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Archive for the ‘Southern Love’ Category

Books and Puppies

I just finished reading a book that has been on my shelf for a while….

  I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys Kingsolver.  It was spectacular and it made me miss a few things:

1. Kentucky (especially the fact that one of the main characters spent her college career in an apartment on Euclid Ave.)
2. Thunderstorms.  Big, booming, loud thunderstorms.
3. Writing and talking about novels.  Not enough to go back and take English classes again, but enough to make me want to keep reading Kingsolver.  I have Animal Dreams on my “to read” shelf…it was an assigned reading during grad school, but I don’t remember actually reading it—that seems like a bad sign.  I have also heard good things about The Bean Trees, and have my eye out for a cheap used copy. Any Kingsolver or Kingsolver-esque recommendations?

—

Unrelated:

(Click Santana’s awesome face to jump to her blog for more pictures of her new squeaky dragon friend named Pinky.)

Wedding Food

Very few words today….but lots of food.

Pre-wedding on Saturday, my family made enough food for approximately 150 people.  There were around 30 people (if that) in attendance at the party.  This was completely out of control wonderful.  It was also my cousin’s birthday around the same time, so my uncle whipped up an adorable and fun birthday cake (he was also responsible for the gorgeous wedding cake farther down.)

 

Yes, that is my grandma’s macaroni and cheese.  All of my friends are familiar with this already, since I make it every chance I get.

It seems like no one got pictures of the actual dinner at Thirteen Moons Restaurant, which was really delicious.  However, we are overrun with photos of cake, cake and more cake.  My uncle went overboard, and I love it…everything was moist and delicious as well as beautiful.  The main cake is a traditional wedding cake with raspberry filling.  There were carrot cake cupcakes and german chocolate cupcakes along with a german chocolate mini-layer cake.

And little boxes (filled by Hicania!) with red and yellow M&Ms along with some other fun candy.

 

   

The “M” was sparkly and wonderful!

The food not pictured included prime rib, salmon, chicken, pasta, veggies, grouper and a side salad with a white balsamic honey vinaigrette that I really want to replicate. 

On Tuesday, Matt and I returned to Thirteen Moons to try some more of their food while not quite so busy with hugs and pictures.  It was a spectacular first dinner out together as a married couple…we ordered Sake Marinated Chilean Sea Bass with baby bok choy and a coconut saffron beurre blanc and Iron Flashed Buffalo Sirloin with horseradish whipped potatoes and truffled demi glace.  Both were outstanding.  Matt started with a repeat of Sunday’s salad and I had the Thai Shrimp Soup, which was delicious, but crazy spicy. 

Of course, on the drive back to the airport, we stopped at Chik-Fil-A for lunch. Our NC wedding weekend was complete.

Where Have I Been??

Yeah…I disappeared.  But really, it was only for 6 months or so.  How much could have happened in that time, right??

Well….

We moved into a new house! We have surprisingly few pictures of it…but it’s wonderful!  We have three bedrooms, a gorgeous and light-filled living area, a fully fenced backyard and a 10 minute drive to work for me!

We bought a shiny new car! Matt’s lease on our Honda was up, and I wasn’t particularly fond of it.  The Mazda 3 is lovely, sporty, and took us on a super fun road trip to Portland for Matt’s birthday…

     

And to a Seattle Sounders game!

We have cooked…and eaten…a LOT!  The following pictures only make up a couple months (if that) of the last half a year.  It has been delicious.

   

Need to know what any of those are?  Ask me and I’ll try to figure it out…I have been pretty lazy about keeping track of things we cook lately.  Included above…a vegetable chickpea curry with paneer, pumpkin lasagne rolls, seared scallops, bean and corn tortilla “pizza”, roasted corn tilapia, homemade Cincinnati-style chili (!!!!) on top of Cook’s Illustrated-style hash browns with eggs and cheese for breakfast, ham dinner for Easter, coconut crusted something….it was all really spectacular. 

I went on an amazingly relaxing celebratory cruise

   

with this lovely new Doctor of Veterinary Medicine:

We cruised in the Bahamas for 5 days, maybe?  In honor of Veronica’s graduation from vet school and my newly-engaged status, we escaped from everything for a few days and got caught up on each other from the last four years.  We need this more often. 

Oh…there was also the small matter of this:

Complete, spectacular happiness.  It turns out planning a small wedding for family and a tiny handful of close friends is a shit ton of work.  Who knew?  Also, we were in NC, so there was sweet tea, chik-fil-a and actual summer weather (we have seen very little of that in Seattle this year)! It all turned out to be really fabulous…with the help of an unbelievably adorable and excited mom, a maid of honor/best girlfriend who kicked butt on the actual wedding day, a lovely lawyer/online-ordained minister friend who helped us create the perfect ceremony, very excited Seattle friends who were more than happy to help me plan all of the details in the middle of the work day, and of course a partner who was really eager to help and smart enough to stay out of the way when necessary. 

Any wedding-planning friends out there, it is so so worth it. Even though there were several points during the weekend when I turned to Matt and said “the next time we get married, we are not doing it this way at all!”  Mr. Wonderful Ross kept me sane through the whole process by saying things like “This is your day! You can’t do it wrong! Your job is to be beautiful and everything else will be perfect! You need to learn to delegate!” My one piece of wedding advice…find someone to tell you these things constantly!

   

I’m back on the road for work again soon and without wedding planning looming over me, I promise I will try to be more bloggy. 

Back to Basics

I’m currently blogging from the lovely Red Roof Inn just outside of Charlotte’s airport.  We spent the long weekend in NC with my aunt, grandma, brother and his girlfriend.  Extremely relaxing and just what I needed.  We did absolutely nothing…sat around, watched tv, made fun of each other, and ate lots of grandma’s delicious food.  Love it.  We’ve been spending lots of time watching the US Open….Matt is a huge tennis fan, and I am catching on. 🙂

Santana spent the weekend at the PetSmart PetsHotel….I felt like a mom dropping my kid off at school for the first time.  It was rough.  I called to check on her once this weekend, and the guy I talked to said she has been having a great time, playing with other dogs, and really enjoying the extra vanilla ice cream treat we paid for.  I can’t wait to see her!

Anyway, before we left, there wasn’t much to blog about food-wise, since we spent the week using up the stuff in our fridge.  Not only did we pull out some of the leftover frozen chili (mostly so that I could make cornbread and make another strata!), we also used a bunch of our fruits and veggies from the CSA in really easy, hearty and satisfying dishes that just got tossed in the oven to bake.  It was nice having things that were so quick and simple.  I love being able to just add a little oil and seasoning (or sugar and cinnamon in the case of fruit), throw the pan in the oven and have a tasty dish that brings out the best qualities of the produce.

Here are a couple pictures of our roast vegetables (pre-roasting and finished product).  We always love these, and I think in the winter we’ll do it a lot more.  It’s hard to justify heating up the apartment with the oven mid-summer.  This batch had freshly dug red potatoes, beautiful striped beets (they lost their stripes while they roasted!), local carrots and a couple green bell peppers.   Tossed with some olive oil, smashed garlic, salt and pepper.  We served it with some butter lettuce dressed with a bit of parmesan herb dressing.  We had some salmon burgers from the store we planned to add on top, but they were not tasty at all, so we just omitted.  It was still delicious and I had the leftover veggies the next day for lunch!

I love the way the veggies get crisp along the edges and all of their sweetness comes pouring out with a little bit of coaxing.  

The second was a fruit crisp.  We got a ton of blueberries in our box (and had some leftover from when Matt’s mom and aunt were in town), so we grabbed some raspberries and peaches from the store.  Tossed with a little sugar, cornstarch, and a couple other things. The mix filled a huge baking dish.

These colors are amazing together.  I didn’t manage to get a picture of the finished crisp…we were too hungry…but it got topped with a streusel-type topping and baked away.  Gooey and warm and perfect for topping some vanilla ice cream.  My coworkers got the leftovers of this one.

A week of delicious reminders that sometimes it just takes a tiny bit of prep to create some wonderful flavors from produce. 

We get home tomorrow afternoon and then head out Thursday morning for a long drive down to Berkeley for a wedding.  Another week with very little cooking.  We’ll see what comes the following week and then I’m on the road for the last week of September and most of October/November as well.  Maybe Matt will have to guest post with all the fun things he is eating while I’m travelling for work. 🙂

The summer is flying by!

So I’d like to say that I have been off on some amazing adventures and that is why I’ve been absent from the blog for so long (almost a month!), but that is definitely not the case.

I have been busy with normal every-day things along with visitors, work events, hot weather and generally lots of stuff to distract me from new recipes and setting aside half an hour to write a blog post.

I do have a recipe almost ready to post from mid-July…since then there has been lots of comfort food, old recipes, hodge-podge dishes and eating out…LOTS of eating out.

A few food-related things to bring me back into blogland:

-        Julie & Julia

• Matt very wonderfully agreed to go see this with me.  I have been a huge fan of Julia Child since elementary school, when sick days meant I could lay in bed with my Grandma and watch Julia Child and Graham Kerr on PBS.  Not only do I love her story and her food, but her attitude cracks me up…every time I catch her on TV I can’t help laughing.  If you aren’t familiar with her background, the movie does a good job of the events leading up to her cooking fame.
• The Amy Adams portion of Julie & Julia was done really well.  It’s a great comparison of the cookbook/food television/celebrity chef pioneer in Julia Child and the food blogging/internet celebrity pioneer of Julie Powell.  The two stories butted up against each other nicely and Adams and Chris Messina portray a really uniquely intimate couple with an amazing and fun relationship to food and the role it plays in their lives (even before Julie sets out on the year-long blogging endeavor).
• Of particular importance…the FOOD!   There are plenty of times in movies and books when the food looks or sounds so amazing that I need to go out and find a recipe…there were several points in Julie & Julia that I felt this urge.  The most was with the bruschetta near the beginning of the movie, when Julie and her husband come to the conclusion that she should write a food blog.  The fried bread topped with the juicy pile of cherry tomatoes soaking in looked AMAZING. I may have to make some of this very soon.
• Beyond all this, Meryl Streep as Julia Child blew the movie out of the water.  She was insanely amazing.  If Julie Powell’s story was made into its own movie, I might go to see it…would definitely get it from Netflix after it was on DVD.  If the Julia Child portion of the movie stood on it’s own, I would be all over it.  Not only because Child’s story is so interesting, but because Meryl Streep did an unbelievable job of portraying such a unique and iconic figure in our culture.  She got the voice, the mannerisms, the humor, everything down pat.  Loved it.  I spent a lot of time laughing, and a few times crying along with Julia (in both happiness and sadness).
• Bottom line, the movie made me HUNGRY!  Good thing we had dinner plans afterward… 🙂

-   As a part of the Tastemaker program with Foodbuzz, I had the exciting pleasure of getting a box full of goodies from Emeril a few weeks ago!  With a chicken spice rub (yet-to-be-tried), a large box of organic chicken stock (HOORAY!), Emeril’s Original Essence Seasoning (fun!) and specialty kicked-up horseradish mustard (brown mustard that we used in recreating this dish and Veronica used on her sandwiches for lunch during the two weeks she was visiting), I had a very very Emeril-filled kitchen for a while.  The seasonings are still in my cupboard, since they’ll take a while to get through, but the stock got used up quickly in a few different dishes and the mustard was perfect in the Maple Pork and Apples.  Delicious!  Thanks Foodbuzz and Emeril (who I’m not a huge fan of, but who makes some pretty delicious products and recipes)!

-    I also have some coupons from Nakano Seasoned Rice Vinegars which I hope are still good…I haven’t redeemed them yet, but am excited to try some out with the recipe book they included! There are a bunch of flavors on their website. I’m not sure which I want to try!  The garlic and pesto sound yummy, but I am also a big balsamic fan, so I may have to go that route…we’ll see what our grocery store offers!

Goals:

1 – Post the blog that is sitting there waiting for me to add pictures and hit “Publish”

2 – Find some Nakano vinegar and create something yummy to share with you

3 – Get back on track with new food adventures and blogging regularly

Wish me luck!

(Matt’s mom & aunt are in town this weekend! Exciting! But, probably not a ton of blogging will be done…stay tuned!)