A little bit of me, a little bit of you & a lot of sharing in between.
This week completely got away from me so instead of a recipe this Friday on Friday Recipe, all you get is this photo of a recipe I hope to share soon. Just looking at it is making my mouth water because it was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten. Don’t hate me.
OK, I’ll give you just a few tiny hints: there may have been crepes involved. And a vacation. And the seaside. But that’s all I’m saying!
Happy holiday weekend everyone!
First of all, by the time most of you are reading this I will be on a big ole jet plane headed out to see Wonder Twin!! Ohhh there will be adventures to share when I get back.
Now, back to the “recipe”. OK, it’s not really a recipe. It’s more of a “look what I made” post. This is how it started:
My uncle showed up at the house the other day with this bag. He plopped it on the counter and said something like, “You’re not going to believe what I brought you.” Oddly enough, this happens a lot with my Uncle, my mother’s youngest brother. Like the time he showed up to a birthday party with a pickup bed full of packed, freshly fallen snow and freshly cooked crab embedded into it. Yeah, this kind of thing happens a lot.
So cautiously, I opened up the mysterious black bag to reveal yet another bag: a bag full of orange ice cubes.
What you need to know about my Uncle is that he is very resourceful. He knows all the local growers and just about every week he talks them into selling him a bounty of little-heard-of produce that you will not find down at the local Bel Air shopping center. One such week he received a bunch of juicy, ripe Cara Cara oranges. I bet most of you (like me) are saying “What is a Cara Cara orange?”
Cara Cara oranges are a variety of navel orange that are known for their almost salmon colored flesh. They are truly beautiful and the flavor is great as well. Something like a cross between flowers, oranges, berries and apricots. But he had A LOT of oranges and rather than let them go to waste (how many oranges can you really eat in a week?), he juiced them and put them into ice cube trays. And that’s what was in the bag.
It just so happened to be the night of the oyster feast, so as an accompaniment I tossed a few of the Cara Cara cubes into a goblet….
… covered them with a little club soda we had stashed away from last week’s birthday party…
…and had a refreshing, bubbly treat! The more the cubes melted, the more I could taste the floral sweetness of the Cara Cara.
It was a good day.
I wonder what Uncle will bring this weekend?
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I am still without internet capabilities a mi casa, if you’re wondering why the posts have been lean lately. I literally had to wander around in a walnut orchard this week to find enough cell bars to send a text message. I finally found 4 bars about 50 yards from the house, it was pretty exciting. And so although I’ve been cooking up a storm and have about 200 projects in line, I can’t share most of them with you yet!
It will all work itself out eventually. Maybe after I get back from my trip I will park myself at a local Starbucks and get some stuff done!
Happy weekend everyone! I hope yours is full of sunshine and joy!
I know, the title of the post says “Southern Greens by Michael Symon.” I promise, there are greens in this story. But first, let me tell you about the rest of the meal.
This story begins with my brother making an unexpected trip to Roseville on Tuesday. Roseville is a cozy little town about 40 minutes from us. It also happens to be where the nearest Whole Foods is located. My brother (who like every other member of my family is also obsessed with food and cooking) was very excited to pull into Whole Foods and come home with 3 grocery bags full of goodies. In one of those bags was a whole mess of fresh oysters. Wednesday, my brother spent the entire day preparing a feast for my sister in law, myself and our uncle who lives just down the road. Part of that feast was oysters 4 ways:
The first oyster selection was, of course, raw on the half shell. This is not my favorite preparation of oysters. It’s not that I mind the idea that they are uncooked. I don’t care for the texture of raw oysters and it just doesn’t taste like anything to me. I get maybe a hint of sea water but other than that the appeal of raw oysters is totally lost on me and therefore, not worth wasting on me. My brother and uncle ate all these raw ones.
The next preparation was grilled oysters with a chipotle butter sauce. These definitely are not part of my P90X diet. I ate them anyway. They were sublime.
Next on the oyster tasting menu was my personal favorite: Oysters Rockefeller. This was my first time trying Oysters Rockefeller and I am now spoiled for any others. Except maybe fried with tartar sauce. Also, not part of my P90X diet.
In the above photos you will finally see the greens I mentioned before! We watched Chef Michael Symon make these greens on his show, Symon’s Suppers last week. Being somewhat of a connoisseur of collard greens my brother was dying to try the recipe. Instead of just the usual collards, the recipe calls for 3 different greens and my brother added a 4th (4 different green, 4 different oysters, I just caught that!): collards, mustard, swiss chard and kale.
He braised the beautiful leafy greens for a couple of hours with a little garlic, onion, bacon and seasoned slightly with some slightly smokey seasoning I picked up at Trader Joe’s a while back (more on that some other time because it is awesome!). Those greens were the perfect healthy counter part to our rich meal of oysters and beer brats. I forgot to mention the brats. We also ate some salty, fatty, tasty beer brats. Also, not on my P90X diet. Neither is that buttered bread.
P90X be… darned! I ate the whole plate of delicious food! It was an al fresco feast on the front patio, overlooking the river with family, eating and telling stories and I don’t regret a moment of it.
Oh, but do try the greens! They are easy, cheap and YUMMY!!!
It’s that time again! A chance to see beauty through my lens. Starting from the top going left to right:
I’m not allowed to buy any more dishes. I have a ba-jillion sets of dishes that I am having trouble keeping stored at the moment. But if I were to buy any new dishes, I would go for these Asian-esque bowls I spotted at Sur La Table. Truthfully, I go into Sur La Table regularly and always wander over to stare at these pretties. I don’t usually go for Asian style but the colors of these bowls remind me Tahoe, my first love. Maybe I can justify buying just a couple as food props…
Yes, those are a bunch of little fish, hundreds of them. They were dried and flat as pancakes. A sales rep bought them at a Mexican market and brought them into my office. Being the stinker that I am, I dared him to eat one, which meant I had to eat one too. What did it taste like? If you have ever cleaned a fish you are familiar with that fishy smell that no amount of soap can wash away. That’s exactly what those little treats tasted like. Like a freshly cleaned large mouth bass.
I went on a walk down to the river and grabbed up a handful of wildflowers along the way. Orange California Poppies, purple Lupine and some kind of wild yellow mustard, I think. Against the setting sun they were just lovely.
And lastly, my walking buddy, Buck. What you have to keep in mind is that the snow is still melting up river so that water he is standing in is fah-reee-zing! But Buck, being a lab, is obsessed with the water and can’t understand why I won’t get in with him. Maybe in July, buddy. Maybe in July.
Source: frugalfeeding.wordpress.com via Danielle on Pinterest
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For weeks I have been meaning to introduce y’all to a website that I know you will enjoy. I think I ran across Frugal Feeding because he made a comment on a post here, I can’t quite remember. But I popped over to his site to check it out and soon thereafter read his post on Cardamom Cookies where he said, “…To be honest, cookies aren’t quite as popular here in Britain as they are in America. Let’s face it, they are rather vulgar, full of sugar and generally too large.”
Well, I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the cookies or Americans but at any rate, I found his writing hilarious and his recipes delicious. He develops budget friends recipes that don’t require a degree in science to decipher. Even though the recipes are usually written in metric, I find them easy to adapt for my American kitchen.
Recently, he posted this little snack item called “Butterbean Hummus with Smoked Paprika Oil.” As I read the article I saw that with the substitution of butterbeans for chickpeas the mixture comes out smooth and creamy which is my #1 pet peeve about gritty hummus. I like the flavors, don’t like the texture. So I’m excited to try this recipe! Also, I find the idea of smoked paprika oil intriguing and exotic. Especially since I don’t have any in my pantry. Which means I get to go shopping.
It sounds spicy, smoky, creamy and mmmmmmm! Can’t wait to try this little snack with some pita chips or maybe even some sugar snap peas. Give it a try!
Making plans to relax this weekend. Hope yours is relaxing too!
