Posted in Food, Personal, Sticks 'n Stitches, Yarn on 11/23/2009 08:02 pm by LittleWit
Posted in Food on 08/04/2009 09:16 am by LittleWit
Saturday morning we got up early and finally made it over to the Farmers’ Market in the next town over. To say I was quite pleased with what we found would be an understatement. We decided to start with just a full circle of the place to see what the farmers all had to offer. After we crossed the street the boy who was not feeling his best and being rather unresponsive to food said “oooo peaches”. I stopped and tried to figure out which fruits he wanted from that stand when we suddenly realized that the vendors were distant relatives of his. 
Serendipity. We chatted for a few and they tried to put us to work, you know since we’re family and all. 
We bought some peaches, blackberries and nectarines. Yum! We will be getting most of our fruits for the rest of the season from their orchard. A little further down I found a place with great peppers. The “small” peppers were bigger than the ones I can normally buy in the store. Works for me! Then we circled back around to the stand that had lamb meat and bought 2 chops to make for dinner over the weekend. (We ended up making them last night with some green beans from another farmers’ market and they were scrumptious!)
In HS I was friends with a girl whose father owned a dairy farm. Whenever I went to visit her I would always have a tall glass of the fresh cow milk. Lately I have really been wanting to find some more of that type of milk. I was told if I wandered over to a Farmers’ Market I should be able to find some and low and behold I did. Snowville Creamery from Meigs county was there with whole milk that had been milked on Thursday. Yum! Of course after buying a half gallon the boy reminded me that we had a full gallon at home that needed to not go to waste. As soon as we got home I set to work looking up recipes that use a good bit of milk on a new site that I rather like. We also started making the innards for Chicken Pot Pie so we would have an easy meal for this week. I had another friend from HS whose mother would spend Sunday mornings cooking up meals for the week for her family. Not only did her house always smell awesome on Sundays but I always got a good filling of yummy food. Basically this is how Saturday ended up for me. First was the chicken pot pie innards and cooking up the steak salad we had for lunch. Then the boy went to take a nap (he’d had a rough night of sleep the night before) and I began making all the foods I had found on the website and in my recipe index.
Pioneer Woman’s Cinnamon Rolls
Pioneer Woman’s Blackberry Cobbler
Erika’s Peanut Butter Cup Brownie Bottom Cheesecake
When the boy woke up from his nap I wouldn’t tell him what I was making but I did drag him with me to the grocery store to buy the missing ingredients. It was fun watching him try to guess what each thing was as it was being created. The cinnamon roll batch was so huge that he couldn’t figure out why I had a whole stock pot full of rising dough. (Note to Self, cut PW’s recipes in half more often! I am not feeding a ranch full of people…) We sliced up half a batch and froze 24 cinnamon rolls for later and laid out another 20 to cook up Sunday morning. We then rolled up the second half of the batch and cut it into 3 logs which we then froze. My parents have claimed one of those three logs. We will probably toss another log to his parents. In all fairness the recipe did say it would make 7 pans of cinnamon rolls…that number just didn’t really sink in with me.
The Blackberry Cobbler he suspected to be Sugar Pie. I had never heard of it but apparently it is a food from the Depression era. When one didn’t have enough money to buy fancy desserts you could use sugar to make a pie and still have dessert. The cobbler was good, his dad will be coming over to get a slice before it is all gone.
Oh and the cheesecake, well considering the ingredients that went into it, he just thought it was a heart attack. We refrigerated the cheesecake overnight and decorated it Sunday morning before my parents came over for lunch. If I were to make it again I would make some definite changes to the recipe. For starters I would remember the chocolate layer in the middle and then halve the filling. The amounts in the recipe really are too much for a standard spring form pan and I don’t have another to put the leftovers in. Oh and it is very rich. Everyone had a bit of trouble finishing their slices especially the boy who grabbed his standard size slice even after being told he wouldn’t really want that much!
I can’t tell you the last time I unexpectedly spent the entire day in a kitchen cooking and baking. It was rather fun but boy was I tired round about 9pm. Oh and we also made dinner in the middle of this. Cornish hens over rice with a pomegranate sauce. Yum!
Pictures of the foodage:
Posted in Food, Travel on 03/04/2009 05:19 pm by LittleWit
International travel is fun but international work travel is busy busy busy. Yesterday was the first day all year that I did not update my blog. So perhaps that will show how busy I was. We’ve been super busy during the day working on our project. Putting together the majority of 25 lessons in 7 days is quite tricksy. As long as tomorrow is a very productive day with few hitches we should be sitting pretty comfortably. Last night my supervisor and the head of the company took us out to dinner at a local Italian restaurant. The food was MARVELOUS. I even ate the mushrooms that I didn’t think I wanted on my pasta. They were actually pretty good but don’t tell anyone! Today for lunch at the cafeteria they had some lamb dish over rice. It was excellent and for 3.85 euro was quite reasonably priced. I am kind of in love with the food over here. Especially since I have learned to read the menus better and can find things that I like that aren’t overly heavy.
Not much going on, on the knitting front as I have been spending the after hours doing more work. Did I mention we were busy? I am really hoping that I find time to get to the wool shop before I leave but it’s looking more and more like that won’t happen. Ahh well. There’s always next time. (Hopefully there is a next time!)
Posted in Food on 10/28/2008 11:13 pm by LittleWit
I may have mentioned at some point last week that we had some fresh lobster that needed to be consumed. Friday night was the night. The boy and I made a Lobster and corn chowder, biscuits (Grands) and cooked up some lobster meat plain. We also cracked open a bottle of Port that we bought during our tour of the Finger Lakes. We opened the port primarily because we needed brandy for the chowder and we didn’t have any. The port worked just as well. It was a very yummy and lovely dinner. Even if it indicates that we are now getting old. Drinking a glass of wine while cooking dinner…sigh, what have we come to? 
Wanna see our yummy dinner?
Chowder cooking, lobster meat steaming
Lobstah meat for the chowdah.
Lobstah meat plain
The boy rescuing the meat from the shell
Fox Run Port purchased during our trip through the Finger Lakes
A complete meal, bowl of chowdah, fresh lobstah, a biscuit and a glass of port.
I surprised myself with how much I really enjoyed the port. It also gave me a bit of a kick. I wasn’t expecting that. The bottle had enough for a glass for each of us and the 2 tbsp we needed for the chowder. Perfect portion.
Posted in Food, Personal, Travel on 10/22/2008 09:30 pm by LittleWit
One of the requirements for traveling to New England is to bring back fresh seafood. My amusing cousins kept trying to tell us that lobster is fresher on Wednesdays so we wouldn’t leave Tuesday evening. Before we split we went to Schermerhorn’s and Donut Dip to pick up seafood and donuts respectively to bring home. The donuts were for the boy because we missed the Pumpkin Festival on Saturday and when my aunt Millie mentioned that Donut Dip had pumpkin donuts I said we had to go. At Schermerhorn’s I got 2 live lobsters, 2 tuna steaks and 2 stuffed clams for the boy and I to try. My mom took home 4 live lobster for her household.
Tonight the boy and I whipped up the tuna steaks from a recipe I have been wanting to try. The trouble with living in Central Ohio is that I wasn’t sure where to go to get fresh tuna steaks and I wasn’t really willing to risk our health by getting not so fresh fish. The tuna cooked up wonderfully and has been added to our “to make again list.”
The boy pan searing the tuna steaks.
Tuna steak rare to medium rare
This just looks so scrumptious to me.
After making the tuna we decided to partially cook the lobsters so that we wouldn’t have to find a place for them to live until we are ready to cook with them on Friday. We found instructions online and nervously went about placing them in the pot. Thankfully there was no screaming.
The lobsters hanging in the cooler.
Alas, one lobster did try to get away and squirmed out of the tong’s grasp landing on our stove. We managed to wrestle him into the pot though. Now they are relaxing in the refrigerator until I can make the lobster chowder and lobster tail on Friday. Mmmm. The stuffed clams will be tomorrow’s dinner. We have to get all this fresh seafood eaten up before the boy leaves for Japan on Sunday. (Anyone else jealous that he gets to go to Japan?)
Not to mention all the awesome yellows I found recently are all at the top of my page saying “hello good morning it’s a beautiful cheery day!”
