Category: Food & Drink

Spring rolls in Winter.

Prep.

The cedar pollen is high in Central Texas.  Which means I’ll be avoiding going outside for extended periods of time.  Unfortunately, that means I can’t lend a hand with the yardwork.  I used to go outside regardless, and dig in the dirt, trim brush and help with picking up leaves.  But then I would be pretty much a sneezing, coughing, itching mess, clinging to a box of kleenex all week.  So I’m hanging indoors this weekend.  Monte cleared the front yard of leaves yesterday, and it looks great.
Today he is cutting down several very tall cedars along the back fenceline that have died from the last couple of droughts.

So, since I’m not out there helping, i’ll feed him instead 🙂

Spring rolls are not your typical lumberjack meal… but that’s what he got for lunch today anyway.   The shot above is of what went into them (minus the noodles and rice paper wrap), and the shot below is of how they turned out.   Hopefully they’ll tide him over til dinner.

Lunch is served.

You don’t so much need a recipe as you do a shopping list.

Spring Rolls

– Rice paper wrappers (soak in warm water for about 5 seconds right before preparing the spring roll to soften)
– Rice vermicelli (boiled up beforehand, I use a small amount on each one)
– Veggies of choice sliced very thin (I like cucumbers, carrots, lettuce)
– Cilantro (fresh, chopped up)
– Shrimp (cook it beforehand, you can also use chicken or beef or whatever you like)
– Peanut sauce (for dipping)

Cut everything up ahead of time, cook your meat, boil the noodles.  Soften a rice paper wrapper (one at a time).  Put a little of each in the center of the circular wrapper.  Fold down the top edge and fold up the bottom edge, and roll as snugly as you can.  Repeat until you can’t eat anymore.

Enjoy!

Tea for me.

Sleepy time.

I bought a couple of cool “tipping” teacups that I ran across while browsing for gifts on the web.   They make steeping loose-leaf tea one cup at a time very easy and quick.  I had to, of course, get one for myself.  🙂  Then I had to find some loose-leaf tea to try out.

I am a 2-3 cup-a-day coffee drinker – have been for years.  But, i was born a tea drinker.   My Irish father drank a cup of tea at breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.   So, I drank it as a kid, too, but very infrequently since then.

I’ve never tried loose-leaf tea, but have heard about how much more flavorful it is than tea-bag tea.  I was eager to find loose-leaf versions of some of my favorite brews:  Irish Breakfast, Earl Grey and Chamomile.  I’m lucky to live in Austin for lots of reasons, but one of them is the local tea-shop called The Steeping Room, which is only about 5 minutes from my house.  I popped over there and stocked up.

The picture above is of the before-bedtime blend called Perfect Night.  It’s a mix of chamomile, rose, rose hips, lavender and pink peppercorns.     I had some tonight and it was delicious.

I’ve also tried the breakfast tea and earl grey black teas — all amazingly flavorful.  I think i’m hooked.

A pair of pears.

Mom sent us a gift box of Washington State pears and apples.  Yum!

Still life.

I’m not so good at New Year’s resolutions.  I make them, but really only for myself.  I suppose the important thing is that I will strive to make 2012 a better year for me — body, mind and soul — and hopefully leave my little corner of the world better than I found it along the way.  I wish the same for you.

Goin’ fishin’.

Hot cocoa.

Today we headed out to the lake to spend the afternoon on the boat.  It’s been a long time since I have been out there.  I’m happy to report that our dock is still attached to land.  It has rained several times since the beginning of November (thankfully), so the lake has risen several inches, and at least has not dropped, so they are holding off on moving us offshore.

I made a steaming hot batch of cocoa for the thermos, so that we could fend off the cold, and packed the peppermint schnapps and mini marshmallows.

We picked up Joe on B-dock and motored out into the cove armed with Joe’s fishfinder and several poles to see what we could catch.   I caught a small catfish.  Monte got a small bass.  Mostly we just listened to Christmas carols on the iPod and watched the blobs go by on the fish finder.

It was a nice way to spend a Sunday.

Soup’s On!

Lentil soup.

With cooler weather in town, it’s time to make soup!  One of my favorites is lentil soup.  As I made this tonight I flashed back to 2 years ago when the kitchen remodel was finally over, this was the first thing I made on the awesome new gas range.

Here’s the recipe I mostly stick to each time:

Lentil Soup

1 lb dry lentil beans
2 Tbsp olive oil
salt & pepper to taste
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped carrot
2 cloves garlic minced
1 14 oz can petite diced tomates
1 Tbsp tomato paste
8 cups chicken broth
4 oz diced lean ham

Rinse lentils well in colander.  Heat large sauce pan to medium high.  Saute onions and carrots in olive oil, add salt & pepper.   Add garlic a little later to prevent it from burning.  After about 5 minutes, add diced tomatoes & juice and tomato paste.  Stir for a few minutes and then add broth, lentils and ham.  Bring to a boil, and then lower heat to a simmer and cover.   Cook for about an hour.

Serve with grated parmesan cheese on top.   Makes 6-8 servings.

Celebrate every day.

Crepes!

Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to leave nearly 5 weeks of vacation for the end of the year, but that’s the way it turned out.   So, after a long-ish Thanksgiving vacation just a couple weeks ago, we are now both officially on vacation for the rest of the year!

To ring in the vacation season, I made crepes this morning.   They’re SO YUMMY!   If you now have a craving, you can find the recipe in this previous blog post.

I hope I can decompress a bit in the coming week or so.  But as much as work can seem to mess with my life and mindset, I really have nothing to complain about.

My mind this week is especially on family members that are experiencing real challenges.  My sister-in-law is in the hospital recovering from surgery to treat recently diagnosed breast cancer.  She is a strong woman, though, beating her first bout with cancer several years ago.   One of my uncles recently was diagnosed with cancer as well a few weeks ago, and is preparing for surgery.    Another uncle is dealing with long-term health issues as well.

So, today I’m sending thoughts and prayers their way, and starting this vacation acknowledging how very blessed I am — and celebrating with crepes.

A Perfect 10.

My other beer goes to 11.

We had a crowd-sourced Thanksgiving meal today.  Monte and Tom provided 2 delicious grill roasted turkeys.  Kate and Glenn brought green bean casserole and Kate whipped up the best mashed potatoes (and peas!) that I’ve ever tasted.  Doray and Sandy made their sweet potato baked cup thingies.  Sue & Marty brought delicious, home-made cranberry sauce, squash, and irresistible bourbon balls.  I baked up some dinner roles,  made gravy from the drippings of the birds and whipped up a pink-jello-whip-cream-cottage-cheese-pineapple dish in honor of all our favorite aunts.  Everything was DELICIOUS!  Laura joined us after dinner, too.

The picture above is of one of the brews that Glenn opened.  He got it part way down before someone noticed the foam on the inside of the bottle formed a perfect number 10!   Pretty funny.   The poor guy wasn’t able to finish this beer for a while, for all the excitement it caused.   But it was a good omen for the day… it was perfect.

I wish all of you a very happy and blessed Thanksgiving Day.

Stopping to create posts on this blog every day (or so) has caused me to pause long enough to reflect on things in my day and life.   I have so much to be thankful for.

Got pie?

Smells so goooood!

Thanksgiving Eve preparations.  Tidy up the house.  Tidy up the yard.

We are having enough people over tomorrow that we needed a bigger table.   But, no folding card table for us!  Monte went into the shop and whipped up a free-standing shaker-style table the exact width and height of the dining room table, long enough to seat another couple of people.   🙂   After throwing on a tablecloth, it looks like one long table.

After dinner we whipped up some of the things that we could make ahead of time for dinner.   I made the traditional pies.    Here’s my recipe for apple pie:

Crust (makes 2: one for top and one for bottom)

2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
2/3 cup unsalted butter, cold, cut into small cubes
6-7 Tablespoons cold water

Mix flour & salt in food processor (w/ plastic blade, not knife).  Add butter cubes slowly while mixing.  Mixture should be dry with pea sized chunks.  Add water, 1 Tbsp at a time while mixing.  Dough should start to roll into one large ball.

Turn dough out onto floured surface and divide into 2.  Shape each ball into a hamburger shaped patty, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 20 mins.

Take out, let soften for a few minutes, and then roll each crust out.

Apple Pie filling:

6-8 tart apples
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup sugar
dash of nutmeg
2 Tablespoons flour
1 Tablespoon butter

Peel and slice apples.  Mix together with cinnamon, sugar, nutmeg and flour.   Place in pie crust.  Dot with butter.  Add top crust, seal and cut slits to let all the magic in.  You might want to put a cookie sheet under the pie while it’s cooking to catch drips.

Bake at 400 degrees for 50 minutes.

Keeping it simple.

Violet for vodka, red for rum.

We have another full-moon raftup this weekend, the Full-Hunter’s Moon.  It’s been several months since we rafted up on the lake, the last few have been marina-based “slip-ups.”

I have been wanting to make Jello Shots for some reason.  Kind of a fun treat for the lake, if I can just figure out how to get them there in tact.   I have been looking around for little 2 ounce plastic cups with lids, and couldn’t find them in grocery stores.   A few weeks ago we stopped by a restaurant supply company and found them – in bulk 🙂

So, this morning I googled conventional web-wisdom on jello shots and came up with the following:

Jello Shots

1 3-oz package of Jello
8 oz boiling water
2 oz cold water
6 oz rum or vodka or whatever

Pour the Jello powder in the boiling water, stir for a minute or two.   Then pour in the cold water & booze and stir.  Fill cups and refrigerate til set. 1 package ended up making about 12 of these 2 oz sized cups for me.   Note that if you put in more or higher octane alcohol, then you run the risk of them not setting properly.  With the mixture I used, the cups set fine in about 4 hours in the fridge.

I popped on the lids, and put in the ice chest for the lake, and they made it just fine.

Sleepless in Seattle.

Giddyup.

As you may have figured out, we extended our stay in Seattle a few more days.  We are working from here during the day and playing at night.   Today is our anniversary, as well.   It just so happens that we got engaged while on a trip to Seattle to attend Patrick and Nga’s wedding.   Monte popped the question and gave me a ring in a waterfront restaurant here – Elliott’s Oyster House on Pier 56.  Nice memories.   So…. since we were in town, we just had to go there for dinner tonight to celebrate.

After work we popped over to Seattle on the ferry.  The mountain was out, though a bit hazy.

Whenever riding the ferry, I buy a bag of cheetos to feed to the seagulls.   Monte had them eating out of his hand.

In Seattle, we walked down the waterfront for a while.    At Elliott’s, we had a great table by the window overlooking the Sound and watched the sailboats and ferries go by as the sun set.  We sampled as much of the seafood as possible – oysters, crab cakes, scallops, salmon…..the food and wine was delicious.

Afterwards we walked up and down the waterfront on the way back to the ferry.   The weather was great.  The first shot in this post is of one of the horses on an antique carousel inside of Miner’s Landing on Pier 57.

A lovely evening indeed.  Goodnight Seattle…

An embarrassment of blackberries.

Fresh from the vine.

Picked a bunch of blackberries today.  The plants grow like weeds here.  They are big and sweet and ready to eat.

When I was a kid my brother and I would often be sent down the street to pick gallons of blackberries at a time – to make pies, jelly and jam.  We would come home with full buckets, covered in scratches, with red stained fingers that you couldn’t get clean even with bleach.   And that is where I learned to dislike spiders.  The bushes are full of incredibly large spiders that love to hide behind the big green leaves, and who also have a tendency of spinning their virtually invisible webs at eye-level across walking paths among the brambles.

This time I wore gloves, and I managed to avoid any close encounters with those gnarly spiders.   🙂

Ok, I feel better now.


I have business meetings in New York this week, so I flew up today.   I checked in to find that the guest rooms do not (amazingly) have wireless, but only wired ethernet connections.  Hard to believe, but, ok, I can roll with that.   So, i plug in and find that the router in the room isn’t working.  I am a little savvy about this sort of thing, so I called down to the front desk to ask for someone to check the network, an hour later a “technician” shows up to look at the desk and declares that all is well on their end, i must dial a 1-800 number to discuss the problem.

So, long story short, after 3 hours into it, without network connectivity and a rapidly growing inbox that I cannot get to, I ask to change rooms, just for grins.    10 minutes later I am in a room 2 doors down, and plug in and voila (!) all is well.

After schlepping my stuff to the new room, i was in business.  About 30 minutes later a nice man from Room Service knocked on the door with this little tray of goodies from the Front Desk staff to make up for the inconvenience.

I must say THANK YOU to the Westchester Hilton staff, nice touch, and much appreciated 🙂

Harvest Moon Slip-up.

La caja china.

It’s a full-moon weekend, which means another get together with our sailing friends.  We have taken to doing “slip-ups” lately, instead of raft-ups, because it’s getting a bit unwieldy to raft-up bunches of boats together in the shrinking coves.  So we party on the dock instead of at anchor.  This is the Harvest Moon full-moon weekend, and to celebrate we wanted to do something big.  So, Ramon graciously offered to roast a pig.  So… how do you do that on a dock at a marina?  Well, you use one of these things in the picture above – a caja china.   Robert and Ramon set up on the middle of the newly-extended F, A & B Dock.  The pig is inside the box on a rack, and the coals are above on a tray.

Cerdo asado.

It turned out delicious.  We had a TON of people, as Texas Sailing brought many of their boat owners over from Lakeway Marina who stayed in guest slips overnight.    Tasha would know for sure, but we think there were about 50 people or more there.

A good time was had by all.  iPod wars on Cupholder wrapped up about 3 or 4 AM.  And, oh by the way, Mike, Wally, Robert and David stayed up all night playing dominoes and generally making a racket all through the night on Allegro in her neighboring slip.  Crazy kids!

Virtual Friday!

Ahhhh.

Today is Thursday, but it is the day before a much needed 4 day weekend!  I’m taking tomorrow off, and Monday is Labor Day, and am looking forward to relaxing with my sweetie.

Cheers!