The basil patch overfloweth. We’ve started handing out basil to our neighbors. Come and get some!
Basil invasion.
Category: Food & Drink
Graceful.
We buzzed over to Chuy’s for dinner tonight. Since we live so close, we eat there often. We have mastered the art of timing our arrival before the after-work happy hour and dinner rush. 🙂
Chuy’s uses those old timey wax paper sanitary wrappers for their silverware. On the back they’ve printed multi-denomenational prayers of grace. It seems so out of place in our world today. But it’s a reminder for us to give thanks for what we have, and for what we are about to eat.
It also caused me to reflect on the dinner times from my childhood. In my family, we sat down for dinner together every night. No TV, no radio. No books or newspapers at the table. We said grace out loud, together. We had to have a little bit of everything on our plate. We had to clean our plate before we were finished (or we’d sit there as long as it took until we did finish), and we had to ask “may I be excused?” before we were allowed to get up, clear our place and leave the table.
Was that really that long ago?
May we all be a little more thankful for our many blessings.
Baby broccoli!
I planted broccoli a few months ago. The plants have grown to about 2 feet high, and now the floret heads are getting big. I can’t wait for the harvest!
Three P’s.
We’ve been anxiously awaiting some, *any*, rain at our house for the last 72 hours or so. In between weather radar checks, I cooked dinner tonight. And as we were finishing, the rain started falling — yeah!!
Pasta, Proscuitto & Peas
6 oz fresh pasta (I used linguine)
1 T butter
1 T olive oil
1 shallot, finely diced
1 clove garlic, finely diced
2 oz sun-dried tomatoes, thinly sliced
4 oz prosciutto, sliced into long thin strips (I trim off fat to throw it in while sauteing the shallots and garlic)
1/2 c white wine
6 oz green peas (i used frozen, you can also use fresh)
1/2 cup heavy cream
6 oz parmesan cheese, finely shredded
Boil pasta in salted water. Over medium heat, saute onions, garlic and sun-dried tomatoes til soft in butter, olive oil and trimmed fat from prosciutto. After a minute or two, add sliced prosciutto. Stir for 2-3 minutes. Add wine to de-glaze pan, stir and reduce by 1/2. Add peas and cream. Stir again for 2-3 mins.
When pasta is done, strain (saving 1 cup pasta water in case sauce needs thinning). Remove sauce from heat and place strained pasta in cream sauce. Toss pasta in sauce. Add pasta water if needed to thin sauce.
Stir in cheese. Serve!
Pizza night.
We made pizza for dinner tonight. 4 doughs. I didn’t get a picture of the first one – with homemade pesto, olives, and parmesan cheese. Delicious! Pizza 2 was a margherita with homemade sauce with tomatoes from the garden, homegrown basil, and mozzarella cheese. Pizza 3 was red sauce, proscuitto, black olives, onions and mozzarella, and pizza 4 was red sauce, artichoke hearts, red bell peppers, olives and mozzarella cheese.
The best part of pizza night are the leftovers.
Julie and I watched Wanderlust tonight. You guys will just have to watch it and judge for yourselves. 🙂
TGIF!!!!
Florae and faunae. And Friday.
Yay Friday! This was a great Friday though. I got to sleep in until 7:30AM (!). Then I finished my last meeting at 3:00, so that I could run to a couple of non-work related appointments, one of which was a well-deserved, self-indulgent, overdue pedicure. 🙂
Then we went to dinner at one of our favorites, and the best Indian restaurant in Austin, in my opinion, Bombay Bistro.
Monte planted a huge patch of basil from seed earlier this spring. Today he thinned out the patch and brought some inside. It’s gonna be a great year for basil!
Then, i saw our resident deer grazing in the front yard, munching on grass and the leaves of the crepe myrtles. He, or she, was not very startled by us tapping on the window to get it to look our way for a shot. I think this is the same deer that we saw a few months ago with an injured leg nesting next to the window of our guest room. The leg looks like it has healed, but there’s a huge knob on the knee of its right foreleg. I’m glad to see it grown up and fending for itself.
Unfortunately, the light wasn’t great, as the deer was standing in the shade of the red oak out front. But he did strike a great pose.
Have a great weekend!
Happy Friday.
I’m glad Friday is here. It’s been a long one.
Rachel baked Julie a cake for her birthday. We went to Musashino for dinner, and then had birthday cake for dessert.
Le pâtisserie.
Monte made a beautiful dessert tonight: tarte aux pommes. Right out of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Fantastique!
My niece, Rachel, arrived today for a few days visit. We made cedar plank salmon and leek & mushroom risotto for dinner. The apple tart topped off the evening.
Julie’s birthday is tomorrow, so we’ll have to celebrate in style.
18 carrot gold.
When I planted the carrot seeds, I put them way too close together. They really need to be thinned out. This is the first batch of carrots from the garden. They are small, but this will hopefully help thin out the bed, allowing the others to grow bigger.
They’re small, but they’re tasty!
Salad and suds.
I was hankering for a salad for dinner. Monte was too. After a brief tactical evaluation, we decided on BB Rover’s.
This is a pic of the suds. The salads disappeared pretty quickly.
Nite nite!
A day to remember.
On this Memorial Day, we spent several hours with friends at the marina. We are actually just starting to look at boats for sale. We looked at 2 sloops on E-dock today. Time will tell how long it will take us to find a successor to our beloved Cupholder 🙂
Speaking of Cupholder, we sailed the slip with Marty, Sue, Joe and Wally, and then headed home.
We had just enough energy left in us to buzz downtown for dinner at Taverna, and stopped by to see Willie along the way.
Pizza and Pils.
My niece is moving to Austin to attend grad school at UT. She and her brother drove down from Seattle, and arrived on Friday. We’ve enjoyed visiting with them for the last few days. Tonight we drove down to South Congress to meet them for dinner, and afterwards watched the bats fly out from under the Congress Avenue Bridge.
We enjoyed an ATX double header: Home Slice Pizza and Austin Beerworks Pearl Snap Pils. Yum!
Un Pinot Gris pour un jour gris.
It rained yesterday and last night and has been drizzly today – a gray day, indeed. But I am not complaining…not til the lake is full.
I downloaded the Color Splash Studio app for my Mac a couple months ago, but have never taken the time to figure out how to use it. This is my first attempt. It allows you to manually remove colors from a color photo. I know I should just get Photoshop, but I’m playing around a bit with other tools first.
For some reason this song popped into my head as I was writing up this post…just try keeping it out of your head for the next day or two. 🙂
Daily bread.
Jacques Pépin‘s biggest fan may very well live under our roof. Monte follows his show regularly. Every once in a while we’ll try one his recipes out.
This is a soda bread recipe that I’ve tried, two ways. Jacques says it can be made either with regular milk and baking powder, or with buttermilk and baking soda (the more traditional, I suppose).
Last week I made it with milk & baking powder. Yesterday, (pic above) I made it with buttermilk and baking soda. Both were good. I think this last loaf cooked a little too long, though. Either that or the fat in the buttermilk caused it to get more yellow than white inside.
You can watch the episode (link here), if you like. Or, here’s the recipe, below. If you want to try it w/ the milk and baking powder combo, just swap out the buttermilk and baking soda in equal quantities.
Soda Bread
1/2 tsp canola oil
3 c all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 c buttermilk (room-temperature if possible)
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Cut sheet of parchment paper to cover baking sheet. Coat parchment paper with canola oil.
Hold 1 Tbsp flour aside to dust loaf before placing in oven. Sift the rest of the flour together with salt and baking soda in a large bowl.
Add buttermilk to dry mixture and stir til combined. You want to make sure to add the buttermilk right before you’re ready to put it in the oven. Don’t let it sit. Turn dough out onto parchment paper. It will be a bit sticky. Cover with saran wrap and form into a round dough, about 7″ in diameter. Remove saran wrap. Dust with previously set aside flour, and cut a shallow x in the top of the loaf.
Cover with an upside down stainless steel bowl. Cook in oven for 30 mins covered. Then remove bowl and cook for another 30 mins.
Remove and place on rack to cool before enjoying.
Sheila365 