World's Most Expensive Casserole

It's called 'Shroomy Crab Mornay Casserole, and it has two and a half POUNDS of Phillips Jumbo Lump Crab under those Old Bay Seasoning-flavored potato chips. OH YEAH BABY!

I got a call from one of my clients a few weeks ago, who wanted me to fill their freezer with various casseroles. The client asked for the Chicken & Ham casserole that I've posted up on Facebook before  - my own family begs for this so often I could make it in my sleep. But then, the client had other ideas, and I was absolutely delighted. They wanted to go off-menu in terms of variety and flavors from my Shore House Shoobie Menu, and among the ideas of what they wanted was a crab meat casserole. Holy smokes!

I'll confess, even though I've worked with caviar, 18K gold leaf, foie gras, truffles, duck, escargots, lobster, and other ingredients that are just off-the-hook expensive, when I got the order for this casserole my first gut feeling was not joy but intimidation - and my response to the client - was, "Are you absolutely sure you want a Crab Casserole?" Not becasue I ahven't worked with crab before - I have, many times, but because of the sheer quantity of crab it would need, I knew this was going to be one badass mother of a grocery bill, even before I hit the store. When I'm working with any ingredient that costs $44 per pound, let's just say the food commands my undivided attention and deepest respect, coupled with a sincere and fervent desire to not screw it up. Just the ingredients alone for this, and yes, I added them up, came out to $146.02. If I charged my client at the normal restaurant markup of a 30% food cost, that's $486.73. For one 9x13 casserole. In a restaurant, if they did them in individual servings, they would sell this at $61 each.

No pressure there!

On the other hand, what an awesome opportunity. Ingredients at this level deserve to be handled beautifully, and allowed to shine on their own merit. Only the highest, most expensive restaurants could dare consider keeping this on the menu, and most likely, they would skimp on the amount of crab meat, or use a lower quality to cut the cost. Or both. This is why being a catering chef is so much fun as opposed to being a restaurant chef -we get so many more opportunities to be creative, and we can have chances like this to just run with the food, and make something amazing and special.

So of course I started with my Culinary Artistry book. It's my go-to tool for when I want to build my own recipe. If you haven't heard of it, it's a cookbook (THE cookbook) for skilled cooks who have already mastered the techniques of cooking, and are ready to just let their muse run wild. It has no recipes, just various lists of classic flavor combinations that go well together, plus some fun reading thrown in in the form of stories and menus and answers to the question "What 10 Ingredients Would You Want If You Were Stranded On A Desert Island" by various well-known chefs. The authors are Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page. I've had 3 copies of this book over the past 15 years - not because I've lost it or let anyone borrow them, but because I've worn them down to pulp using them.

I spent about 4 hours mentally building the recipe - trying things out, cutting them, getting way over the top (wild mushrooms, anyone?) and then simplfying it all down again. The thing was to not take away from that exquisite crab. What it came down to was a classic American casserole - the mandatory Campbell's Cream of Mushroom included - with tiny baby button mushrooms that had been sauteed in butter and sherry, sour cream, Mornay sauce, twisty egg noodles and a kiss of fresh tarragon. And then, in a nod to our region, I topped it with Utz potato chips that has the Old Bay Seasoning flavor.

The only thing I would do differently if I was doing it for my own consumption is I would add some tomatoes, but the client is located at the Jersey shore, so really, this is going to be sublime paired with a simple fresh Jersey Tomato & Grilled Sweet Corn salad, or even just sliced tomatoes. This is going to make an exquisite summer meal.

‘Shroomy Crab Mornay Casserole

Serves 8-10 (Makes one 9x13 sized casserole)

Ingredients

2.5 lbs (5 cups) Phillips Jumbo Lump Crab Meat  (Canned or the plastic containers doesn’t matter, but I only use Phillips brand ever, and yes, it’s hard to find and expensive, but you get what you pay for)

1 can Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup (Family-sized can)

16 oz. Sour Cream

6 oz. baby button mushrooms, wiped, trimmed, and thin-sliced

 ½ stick butter

Mornay sauce

Madeira or sherry – 2 oz

1 large pkg Egg Noodles

Tarragon, fresh, fine chopped, 2 Tbsp

Bag of Old Bay Seasoned potato chips (I use Utz “The Crab Chip”)

Method

First sauté the mushrooms in the butter until they are browned, then pour off the excess butter into the pot you will make the Mornay sauce in, and splash the sherry into the mushrooms. Bring to a boil then turn off heat and allow the mushrooms to absorb all the sherry. Set aside.

Second make the Mornay Sauce: (Mornay is Béchamel with cheese added)

3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 cups warmed milk (microwave 2 min is fine)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon white pepper
pinch freshly grated nutmeg (optional)
2 ounces grated Gruyere (can substitute Parmesan if desired)

To the reserved mushroom butter, add another tablespoon and melt it, stirring, so that the butter is creamy and melted, then add in the flour – whisk quickly and keep stirring to make it smooth and cook the flour. Make blond roux, fully cook it but not brown, then slowly whisk in milk letting it thicken, and allow to come to a boil, season with Salt, Pepper & Nutmeg. Then gradually whisk in cheese until it’s fully incorporated and smooth – not sticky or stringy. Taste it - the flavor of the cheese should be subtle, not overpowering. Don’t worry about it being thick – that’s what you want. Set aside until you are ready to make casserole sauce. For casserole sauce: Mix together the Mornay Sauce, cream of mushrooms soup, sour cream, and mushrooms. Taste. Adjust seasoning if needed. Cook the pasta – firm, of course, for casseroles. Drain the pasta, cool it under running water, and immediately toss with about 2 cups of the sauce to coat the pasta. Gently, gently, gently fold in Crab Meat being careful to not break up the lumps, tarragon, and more sauce to your desired consistency, dispersing crab evenly through the mixture. Then pour into well-greased casserole dish. Top with crushed Old Bay Potato Chips. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes or until heated through, or freeze.

So, the funny thing is, as I was posting on Facebook about making this recipe, one of my friends told the story of how she had recently ordered a "crab mushroom casserole" from a restaurant. She joined in the conversation with the advice not to put "too many mushrooms" in it - because when she got her order, it was almost ALL mushrooms and hardly any crab.  She felt cheated, and now is forevermore suspicious of  "crab casserole" on any menu again - and who can blame her? What a bad experience! How many times have we all gone out to eat, seen something that sounds wonderful, notice it is reasonably priced, and then when you get it, find that it is not what you expected?

But that's what happens far too often. When a chef makes a menu up, it's incredibly fun to create and be inspired... but you have to do the "perspiration" behind the inspiration or in reality it's going to fail. Crab on the menu sounds wonderful. Crab that goes missing from the kitchen, or doesn't sell and gets thrown away, is death to a restaurant. You need to cost out your recipes, control your portions, and take seasonality and your customers into account. You can't put a $60 entree onto a menu where everything else is priced under $25. They cut quality or quantity or both, in order to hit a price point and make a profit. And then we all lose - the chef is making lower-quality food, the customer is feeling the kitchen over-promised and under-delivered, and nobody's really happy.

Except MY customers! Who get 5 cups of the best premium crab on the market, to 1/2 cup of mushrooms. Mwahahahahahaha! (The benefits of paying for groceries separately from my time.. my clients get a lot more bang for the buck than going to restaurants, and can have higher quality.)

Now, you may be wondering why, when I went to so much trouble to make up this recipe, would I share it this openly. I'll tell you why - weddings are on my mind this week. I am very happy there's about to be a lot more of them. And there are NOT a lot of really elegant, really easy recipes out there that would be doable for a home cook... and could potentially be made six weeks to a month in advance and frozen uncooked. How awesome is that? The night before the wedding, move the casserole(s) from the freezer to the fridge to thaw, and then they should only take about 45 minutes to bake - check the internal temperature with a thermometer, but you only need to bring this up to 140 degrees  in the center - the seafood is already fully cooked, and there are no raw eggs used.

This would make a fabulous entree for a Brunch or Lunch Wedding for some bootstrapping DIY couple who are on a tight budget. Especially for a small, intimate wedding of 25 or less, this would make an easy, elegant main course. I'd buy or rent single serving porcelain ramekins and bake them on a baking sheet, instead of cutting a big tray for portion control... but if you were having a buffet, then you could make this in a large pan. Top it with Panko break crumbs tossed with Old Bay Seasoning instead of potato chips. And yes, they could substitute cooked lobster or shrimp into this as well.  Pair it with an heirloom tomato salad or a melon salad (crab and melon really work together) or mixed baby greens, some artesian breads, and it's a perfect meal.

A lot of love and joy went into creating this, and I'm very proud of it.

Now THAT is a crab-to-mushroom ratio to rival the Ritz!

My Heart Literally Yearned For This

That weird-looking little round green thing is a caper berry. If you think it looks cute here, you should see it stuck to a skewer sticking out of a Bloody Mary or two - freakin' ADORABLE!

I read a funny Facebook meme last week, someone was figuratively going to start killing people for over-misusing the word literally. Hopefully they will read the whole post before throwing their little hissy fit at my title, though it's kinda fun to imagine somebody sitting at their computer throwing grammar hissy fits. Hehehe.  Must be nice to have problems like that. There, They're, their, honey! Go outside, eat an apple, and breathe - life's too short already.

So, over the past week, I have been perfecting a recipe for a party dip. It's a very, very good dip. So good, in fact, that in having a very small group of people test it, I'm also having them sign nondisclosure agreements because it is a super frozen product, and I've been combing through the US Patent Office website to see what my options are, and I need to get the ball rolling as I only have a year once it becomes public knowledge.

The downside to recipe development is the tasting. Most people would think that's the upside, but it's not - you taste dozens of "Not quite right" until you get the DING! And sometimes it's a texture thing, not a flavor thing, that keeps you tinkering with the recipe. Sometimes it's a food chemistry thing - this happens frequently in commercial recipe development - the recipe works great in a small batch, but once you start scaling it up (Making, say, 20 dips instead of 1 - which would still be a tiny little batch compared to commercial production), the ratios of ingredients don't hold stand up to  produce the same consistent product. My dip, needless to say, has cheese in it... imagine eating cheese for 4 hours each day for a week. Yeah. I hit the point where the dip was coming out my ears by Sunday. At this point, I might never walk past a wheel of brie without flipping it the bird again.

It's not like I'm thin to begin with, and it's not like about half my booty hasn't been made out of Bearnaise Sauce for the last 15 years... but, seriously, I got to the point where I looked at Brent and somewhat fearfully confessed, "I know you are LOVING this project I'm working on, but if I don't eat a bucket of some kind of green vegetable matter soon, my heart is going to come exploding out of my chest like the monster in Alien!" He laughed. Oh, suuuure... he's under 30 and still immortal. I remember those days. Bastard. He would eat nothing but sides of beef wrapped in bacon for two meals a day if I let him get away with it; three, if I gave him a vat of Deitz & Watson Smoky Horseradish sauce for dipping it in.

Hence, my lunch today was, by design, on the Lighter Side. Not just in terms of calories and good monounsaturated fat, but I craved lemon, and vinegar, and the crunch of blanched asparagus. Craved a nice healthy salad. Craved something vegetarian.

But I'm swamped,  and only had about 15 minutes to make my own lunch today, because I'm running around like a crazy woman, making up samples, printing out nondisclosure forms,  writing blog posts about the rambling dustbunnies in my brain, and letting them come out to hop around for you , dear reader.... Are they fricasseeing dustbunnies, do you think?



Seriously, be glad you don't live with me. My twisted mind goes off on tangents like this all day long.


So here's what I threw together. Honest to Blog, it took longer to wait for the water to boil before hand while I did other things, and take the pictures afterwards, than it did to make this salad:

Asparagus Cannellini Bean Salad with Lemon Pesto Vinaigrette
Serves 2

Ingredients

1 bunch fresh Asparagus snapped, woody stems discarded
1 19 oz. can Cannellini beans (also called white kidney beans) (I used Progresso)

For the dressing:

Pesto Sauce - 1 heaping tsp. (I used Buitoni, pre-made "light" pesto. Really.)
White wine vinegar - 1 Tbsp.
Extra Virgin Olive Oil - about 3 Tbsp.
Zest of 1 lemon
Lemon juice - 1/2 lemon
Salt & Pepper to taste

Start by putting a big pot of water on to boil, unsalted, and while that is heating up, wash and snap the asparagus, throw way the woody stems. Set up one large bowl of ice cubes and water for refreshing the asparagus after you blanch it. Using a colander, rinse the beans thoroughly under cold running water.

In a medium-sized bowl (big enough that you will be able to toss the asparagus and beans in once they are ready) make the Lemon Pesto Vinaigrette by first putting the pesto in the bottom of the bowl, and then, using the tines of a fork (or you could dirty a wire whisk if you wanted - I didn't) beat in the vinegar and then, very slowly, drizzle in the olive oil as you are beating to get a nice fluffy emulsion.

Toss the beans gently into the dressing so they have a little extra time to absorb the dressing, and season with a little salt and pepper - you can adjust more later. Cut a few thin peels off the lemon for zest, then halve it to squeeze in a few minutes. By now the water is boiling, so throw in all the asparagus, and count slowly 30-35 seconds (I go by color - brightest green wins). Using tongs, remove the asparagus from the boiling water and plunge into the ice bath, and leave there for a few minutes to chill fully. While it is chilling, cut away any pith from the underside of the lemon peel and finely slice or mince the zest ( I did a little of both - mixed the minced into the salad, used the sliced zest to garnish). Once the asparagus are nice and cold, move them to paper towels to gently dry, (you don't want them to water down your nice handmade dressing, right?) then place them in the bowl with the beans and dressing. Give everything a good toss to coat the asparagus with the dressing, then squeeze the lemon half over all of the salad, and adjust the salt & pepper, and divide onto two plate, arranging as you like. Garnish with extra lemon zest.

And yes, now that I've told you all of that, let's get a certain fine point of cooking out of the way, since this is only, like, my 5th post here on the Hot Mama Tarditi's Gourmet-To-Go-Go Blog: never, never hesitate to use a good-quality pre-made product when it suits the purpose of the recipe, especially when it's just for your own self to enjoy. If I was making this for a client? I'd use fresh. For entertaining, if we had a party? Fresh. But just me when I'm hungry (or my kid's school lunches?) - whatever's on hand that we need to use up around here before it would get thrown away works fine for us.

I'm not that kind of snotty, foo-foo, nose-in-the-air chef. Can't stand 'em.

I'm talking about the pesto sauce I used today. Of course I can make my own pesto sauce. And, at the end of the summer, when the farmers are begging for people to haul it away by the Hefty bagful, I will make my own pesto sauce! Gallons of it. From scratch. Using the really good olive oil and pine nuts and Parmesan. And I will freeze it and enjoy it all winter until it runs out - on burgers, on pasta, swirled into soup, spread on bread - until we run out of homemade again. When you use it as a condiment, you go through a lot of pesto, and you keep it on hand as par stock. At least we do. Our favorite homemade cheeseburgers around here are made from buffalo meat patties, topped with pesto, fresh mozzarella, and tomatoes. The point being, having something like that on hand makes a "gourmet" lunch yours in less time than it would take to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, so don't get overly hung up and stressed out on the whole "must be made from scratch" mindset; the point is to just enjoy Great Food.

And not have your heart literally explode out of your chest. Like in Alien.

You Can't Go Wrong With Bourbon

Hello all! The Kentucky Derby is upon us this weekend, and many people are going to parties for the occasion. One of them happens to be my cousin Barbara, who asked me this week for a really easy recipe for dessert.

Now, let me just say, there IS such a thing as the classic Kentucky Derby Pie. And it's completely scrumptious. Think of a chocolate chip cookie, made into pie form, and that's pretty much what it tastes like. Some variations use more chocolate, some are almost a modified pecan pie, some have bourbon and some have walnuts... but really, when it comes to pie, and especially one made with those particular ingredients, is there any WRONG way to do it? No. No there is not. Pie is it's own virtue. Happiness, on a plate.

But when you want to make a dessert for 25 people at a party, Kentucky Derby Pie is not the way to go if you want "Easy". First of all, getting six slices per pie, you'd need to make 6 pies... and unless you're someone like me who's used to bulk cooking, that's a bit much for anyone.

Now let me tell you all a dirty little secret of mine: I like eating desserts, but I'm not overly fond of making them. When it comes to creating food, I think in flavors, and taste recipes in my mind as I'm making them up. So, when I have to think about sweet-sweet-sweet, I can't do it for very long, or I find myself looking for the nearest bag of pretzels, extra salt, please. One of my pet peeves is that desserts are becoming over-sugary as Americans are getting so addicted to no-calorie or low-calorie sweetened products that our collective palates are demanding a bigger sugar hit from foods that normally you don't think of having any sugar in them (breads are a classic example - have you tasted the soft pretzels at Wawa these days? Like a salted doughy sweet roll. Poor Maria Nacchio is turning over in her grave.). So what happens to the real sweets when your supposed-to-be-savories all have a higher sugar content and your palate is desensitized? Exactly. Oversweetened. And then you get companies who've already identified customers like me as a market segment, and have come up with an even more intense work-around to try to keep me coming back: the salted caramel trend. Salty and sweet at the same time... it lights up more of the "yum" braincells all at once. Where one was a sparkle, that, my friends is the whole fireworks grand finale over Cinderella's Castle, at least when you are a supertaster.

So back to my cousin's dessert: I suggested, first, a bourbon sauce. It is the Kentucky Derby, after all. It's tradition! Drinking bathtubs full of bourbon in the middle of the Bible Belt is one of those things that makes America great, and gives me hope for our future! And, now that I've told you all about lighting up those fireworks, you'll see why I gave my cousin this recipe, with salted butter:

Dessert Bourbon Sauce

2 pounds of butter (salted is fine)
1 pound of dark brown sugar
1/2 - 1 cup of bourbon (depending on how boozy you like)
1 cup heavy cream

Put the butter and sugar into the pan, over medium-high heat and stirring constantly, wait for it all to melt together enough that the sugar is fully melted - no longer "grainy" - you can hear it against the back of the spoon and feel it in the texture. Once that happens, turn off the stove, slide the pan to a cool burner, and carefully stir in the bourbon... the reason I say carefully is because alcohol and high heat can flame (though it takes more than this... usually to make it flame for Bananas Foster, I have to get a full boil going and then light it). Once the bourbon is stirred in, return the pan to the hot burner, turn the heat back on again, and stir in the cream. Bring the whole thing a a boil (about 3 minutes) and then take it off and put it in a glass bowl. You can make this in advance, keep it in the fridge, then when you are ready to serve, just microwave it until it's warm - about 3 minutes, stirring at each minute to make it heat evenly.

She's going to get the salty-sweet-fatty hits on this sauce, and everyone is going to love it. And, if that is all Barbara wants to do? Serve this with some brownies or chocolate chip cookies, and she's done. If it wasn't still so damned cold around here, STILL!, I'd tell her to fold it into softened vanilla ice cream and slap it between soft-baked chocolate chip cookies for a grownup ice cream sandwich.

However, if that's not quite enough, and my cousin feels like getting more creative, but easy creative, I suggested pairing the sauce with This Bread Pudding. I love Allrecipes website. I especially love their 5-star rating system, and the fact that all the ratings get averaged by real users... when you get a recipe that has 4 1/2 stars from over 1,800 people? You know that recipe rocks. I use them a lot for research... like for this recipe for my cousin, I suggested to take that basic recipe, but then substitute a more appealing dried fruit for the raisins - like cherries or dried cranberries, which would give a more interesting flavor and color to her results. And that it was entirely fine to choose a different bread, or mix half wheat/multigrain and half white. I've even tasted a sweet bread pudding made from RYE bread before - and it worked! I couldn't believe how great it turned out when they brought it to me... the two girls I used to work with were superb cooks. Great palates. It was always a pleasure tasting their food.

I had a Chef back in culinary school who taught the class on how to design a restaurant, front and back of the house, seating flow, kitchen equipment. God I hated that class! Not because of the  subject matter, - that was very interesting -  but because the Chef made us do the project in teams. He came from the Fortune 500 side of the food industry, was really into the whole corporate mentality of MBA buzzwords this and Six Sigma that, and his personal favorite of these was synergy. That guy had A Thing for the word synergy to the point of fetishism, no lie, and was always jonesing to see it in action. He had the insane idea that this coveted synergy would happen only by giving us a massive project, with an impossible deadline, and then assigning groups so that each was a mix of the top students with the about-to-flunkouts. And when you have a running 3.97 GPA and have spent 5 semesters on the Dean's List, watching more than 60% of the people in your program drop out, the thought of a slacker-group-induced-C is enough to make you contemplate murder. The group I was in wasn't too terrible, truth be told. (Luckily for me, the Chef also had a huge crush on one of the students - they lived together for a time - and had set it up so his little F-boy was at least guaranteed a B for his miserable page worth of work, while the rest of us frantically pulled all-nighters.) However, our group, much to his personal annoyance, did not have synergy.

Why am I mentioning this? Because Bread Pudding does have synergy. If any food can be said to be greater than the sum of it's parts, Bread Pudding is the embodiment of synergy: stale bread, eggs, cream, butter, and some kind of flavoring ingredients, and POOF! Warm, velvety awesomeness that you can take in any direction and have a dish worthy of setting before Royalty. Bread Pudding dates back thousands of years - versions of it were made in ancient Rome, Egypt, the Middle East and India. It's like soup that way - across cultures and centuries people love Bread Pudding.

One time I even poisoned my ex-husband with it. But that's another story.

Have a great day, all!

Hello World! Have a Margarita!

Please, join me in a toast: to the first post of the Blog for Hot Mama Tarditi's Gourmet-To-Go-Go!

And let's make it a social! Here's my own recipe, modified over the years from my brother's and father's recipes:

Hot Mama's 3-2-1 Margarita Recipe
Makes 2 Servings

3 parts (6 oz.) Jose Cuervo Especial Gold Tequila
2 parts (4 oz.) Nellie & Joe's Famous Key Lime Juice
1 part (2 oz.) Triple Sec (I used Dekuyper because we had it )
1 Tbsp. Madhava Agave Nectar Amber (if you can find the Raw, use that!) (and swish the tablespoon in the pitcher to get the full amount into the mix - stuff's sticky!)
1/4 tsp. (leveled) Kosher Salt for the drink (+ extra  pile to rim the glasses in)
2 large scoops ice -  the cubes should take up the volume of the liquid, but still "swim" freely

Combine all of the measured ingredients above in a blender pitcher; also form a small pile of salt for rimming on a separate plate.
Blend on Ice Crush setting until fully smooth
Dip the rims of the glasses in the margaritas in the blender pitcher to wet them, then rim then in the extra salt.
Pour in the Margaritas & Enjoy!

Notes: The 3-2-1 ratio of Cuervo Gold to Nellie & Joe's Key Lime to Triple Sec makes an absolutely outstanding Margarita, no matter if you are using ounces or bathtubs to measure it out. Always excellent results. Add the sweetener and salt to taste, and the ice or water to your level of preferred alcohol strength. I use the Agave nectar because 1 - it's made from the same cactus that the Tequila comes from, and, 2- we always have it on hand in our house (my kid has ADHD, it has a "slow burn" compared with sugar)

Hi! 

I'm Liz, quite literally the head cook and bottle-washer around here: Chef, Owner & Mama of Hot Mama Tarditi's Gourmet-To-Go-Go (the Personal Chef & Catering company), and the person who will be writing these blog posts, at least until my beautiful daughter grows up, takes over the Family Business, and lets me retire in splendor to a beach where I will spend my golden years under the shady trees, creating new recipes for Rum and Tequila, and Talking Like A Pirate every Tharrghsday. But I digress...

I hope you like the 3-2-1 Margarita recipe. It really is my Personal Secret Recipe*, and it has spoiled me for all others, except maybe the ones from Tommy Bahama's in Naples, Florida. Maybe.

I hope the Blog Name made you smile the instant you read it, because it actually has a story of its own, and by way of telling you the story of Hot Mama Tarditi's Gourmet-To-Go-Go, I can introduce myself as well.

The first Personal Chef business I started, years ago, was in Seattle, Washington before my daughter was born. It was called Today's Gourmet, and I was even featured in a USA Today article about personal chefs at that time. However, there had been another, WAY-COOLER name that had popped up when I was brainstorming what to name my business: Hot Mama Tarditi's Gourmet-To-Go-Go. I loved it! It was so fun! Nobody would ever forget a business with a name like that! Yay!

My then-husband was horrified.



Oh well, he wasn't a bad guy; he just didn't share my delightful sense of whimsy. Nor my effervescent charm, and quirky sense of humor. Talk Like a Pirate Tharrghsdays did NOT happen in his well-ordered world. Ever. Poor fellow. I named my first business Today's Gourmet, and I was very happy with my clients, and busy, until...well... Life. Once we both realized it just couldn't work out, our baby girl and I took the first plane out, back to the glorious home of my birth, my beloved Philadelphia. Cultural Center of the Universe. Where wild Wawa's roam free, and spectacularly fresh sandwiches are our Inalienable Right at any hour of the clock. Land of cheese steaks, Taylor Pork Roll, Tastykakes, blue-claw crabs, Jersey tomatoes and corn, Pennsylvania Dutch scrapple and handmade sausages, fresh milk and dairy to make the angels weep. Where a thousand phenomenal Italian restaurants fight it out like culinary gladiators for the honor of your patronage, and you can get a soft pretzel The Way God Intended: doughy, wet, lightly smoked by the fumes of a Septa bus tailpipe, served in a brown paper bag by the unwashed hands of a guy standing by the side of the street, with mustard.

Did I mention my quirky sense of humor? Yeah.


So, flash-forward 10 or so years, and it turned out along the way that our darling daughter had some pretty unique and special issues, that needed both of us to step up and bring our A-games. Her Dad and I? Our relationship has never been better. Really. We rock as divorced co-parents in a way we never did as a married couple. But the road from there to here meant that I had quite a few years of struggle, trying to juggle being a mom of a kid with special needs, with a career that paid the bills. And then just for fun, The Great Recession hit us all.

And finding myself unemployed, in a tough job market, I struggled. Really. Until one day, I was reading the blog of another young single mom, with two little girls of her own, who was going through chemotherapy and was talking about how tired her treatments leave her, and her own mom had passed, and how much she needed a way to take care of her family over the ongoing weeks of her battle. Wow. Talk about a cosmic slap upside the head... there I was, thinking I had problems?!?!

She inspired me to try again, even though the thought absolutely terrified me.

So I prayed, really hard. The Big Prayer - a Novena. And I talked to my Wonderful Man (he's "new" you'll hear about him later!), and then I had a moment where I got this crazy name of "ManiFEASTation" in my head and I knew that was just such a terrible, terrible pun it was not what I was supposed to do... but I was supposed to cook for people who really needed me. People who were recovering from surgery or doing chemo or just had life situations where they needed good, nurturing food from someone who could think in flavor and modify any recipe to fit their needs. People who needed my creativity in coming up with the nutritional balance they needed, and menus that would help tempt them, and still feed their families. I had renewed my ServSafe certification in my former job, which I'll post about sometime later, I'm sure.

But I was still shaky, unsure if I should take the chance again, to stick my neck out and try to start my own business again - honestly, it had been a rocky 10 years. And then the most amazing thing happened, I posted on Facebook that I was praying for guidance, about making this decision, and so many people sent me positive energy and prayers, and in the comments one night, I joked about the name, and at least it wasn't "Hot Mama Tarditi's Gourmet To Go Go".

And everybody stopped. I got all kinds of messages, most everyone loved the name and asked WHY wasn't I using it?

And then I thought back... 10 years... wow, ...  that name I never used, still stuck with me.

And I still liked it. A LOT.

Hot Mama Tarditi's Gourmet-To-Go-Go.

It made me smile. It made me laugh. And it made me realize, I'd come full-circle. Back when I first thought of the name Hot Mama Tarditi's Gourmet-to-Go-Go, I wasn't ready to BE "Mama" yet. I was still a Noob, at so many, many things. I had a lot to learn, and a lot to live, and a lot to grok, and a road to travel.

Once Upon A Time, I graduated at the top of my class in 1999 from the AIS culinary program set up by French Master Chef Roland Henin, CMC, and I also had a BA from Villanova University. I am ServSafe certified, and can cook for people with sensitive or compromised immune systems, such as post-surgery, or in chemotherapy, young children or seniors, and I am able to customize all of the recipes I make, or create new ones, to provide the nutrition as well as the delicious flavors that are so important to lifting a person's energy and wellness. I make all of my menus with the whole person, and the whole family, in mind.

My new business name is Hot Mama Tarditi's Gourmet-To-Go-Go. I hope that name makes each one of my clients smile, and lifts their spirits before they even take their first bite. I want to enliven, uplift and nourish people's whole beings with my cooking, body, mind and spirit. I want to create beautiful food, to keep learning and creating new things, that make people happy - no matter if they are celebrating the great things that life brings, or are struggling through tough times. That's the story of Hot Mama's. That's the story of me.

Welcome, Friends!

(Now, let me get back in the Kitchen, where I belong....)


* For the business, we DO pick up from the PLCB State Stores for our clients, as an errand, for only a set, standard service charge for the stop made: clients get the original PLCB receipt for their purchase with no up-charge. We don't sell alcohol.