Post-Yoga Dinner — Salad and Involtini di Melanzana

I’ve had some long days lately, specifically Wednesdays. Each Wednesday, I work from 8-5 then have yoga class from 5:30-7, meaning I leave the house around 7:30 a.m. and get home close to 7:30 p.m. It makes for a long day.

To help me out, sweet Husband has been cooking dinner while I’m at yoga and serving me when I get home. It’s been heavenly!

This week, he prepared a delicious meal mostly with veggies from our local market.

We had a simple salad of romaine lettuce, purple onion, banana peppers, and cherry tomatoes with a lemon, capers, and olive oil vinaigrette (I made the dressing because I like to help).

To accompany the salad, Edmond prepared Involtini di Melanzana (eggplant rollups is my loose translation). He used this recipe from his hero, Mario Batali. It was delicious and ever so sweet of him to think of me. A perfect post-yoga, vegetarian meal full of local ingredients.

Local Ingredients Used:

• onion
• banana peppers
• cherry tomatoes
• eggplant
• eggs
• rosemary (Edmond added this to the frittata because it’s my favorite–see, so sweet)

Dinner is served

If you’re an eggplant fan, give it a whirl.

Or, try my vinaigrette:

Juice of one lemon

1 tbsp capers, chopped

olive oil to taste (less for tart dressing, more for not-so-tart dressing)

salt and pepper to taste

Whisk all ingredients together and toss with salad. Easy peasy.

Candles Are for Romance?

As everyone knows, yesterday was devastating for those of us living in The Deep South. Tornadoes ravaged parts of Mississippi and Alabama, destroying homes, businesses, and lives, and many other states were damaged as well.

Edmond and I were fortunate that nothing bad happened in our hometown, but we did lose power for several hours. In the beginning, we enjoyed reading, but then it got dark. It was much too early for bed, so we decided to cook dinner. That’s right, we cooked dinner without power.

We lit a bunch of candles and set to work. Edmond went outside and put a pot of water to boil on the outdoor burner he uses for homebrewing, and I set to work chopping vegetables in the kitchen.

Cooking by candlelight is so much more fun

At the end of a half hour or so, we had a delicious pasta salad. This is one of our favorite things to make because we can add pretty much anything we have on hand. We had these items either in the freezer (corn) or pantry (everything else), but we’ve made many other combinations in the past. It’s perfect for any family gathering, an easy lunch, or, apparently, tornadoes and power outages if you have the right equipment.

Paula Deen's Bloody Mary

In keeping with my theme from last year, I will use Valentine’s Day to post about the bloody mary, something I am forever in love with. I celebrated my birthday late last year by going to Savannah and Charleston with my mom. On our last day in Savannah, we did what any number of tourists do and ate lunch at The Lady and Sons, Paula Deen’s restaurant. It was delicious, but I’m not writing about the food today. We started our meal with a bloody mary. I figured someone as over-the-top as Paula Deen would understand that condiments do a bloody mary make, and I was certainly right.

Our bloody marys consisted of a tall glass rimmed with crawboil, vodka, mary mix, lemon and lime wedges, pickled shrimp, spicy green bean, olive, and pickled asparagus spears. It was gorgeous. Tasty, too! When next in Savannah, you must stop in for one of Paula Deen’s bloody marys. Well worth your time!

Bloody Mary from The Lady and Sons

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all!

Photo credited to my mother.

What's Fair is Fair: President Obama is My Homeboy

Silly me left President Obama out of my post last week about the White House kitchen garden and First Lady Michelle Obama. I’m pretty sure he and I would be fast friends as well. Why? Well because he loves Louisiana Hot Sauce. And how can you not love someone who appreciates a delicious condiment like hot sauce, especially Louisiana Hot Sauce?

That's the good stuff!

Happy Saturday, everyone!

Photo from here.

Eating Local in the Summer Is Easy

Despite the sweltering, miserable, suffocating heat of Mississippi in the summer, I still adore this time of year because I am able to grow a lot of my own food, watch hummingbirds (from a distance though because they’re a little too much like big bees for my taste), and have daylight until after 8pm.  I also enjoy buying vegetables from an old man on the side of the road and going to the farmers’ market.  Side note: This year, my husband and I are even running a booth at the market.  We bake and sell fresh bread.  It’s tasty.  Read about it here.  End side note.

My most favorite thing about summer, though, is the amount of fresh and local produce I am able to eat.  Case and point, this meal, in which nearly everything was either locally made or locally grown.  For dinner, we had hamburgers and grilled corn.  I shall take you through the ingredients, so you can see just how easy it is to eat locally, especially in summer.  I like to use the word “shall”; it’s far too under-used.

First, the ingredients: bread, mustard, tomato, lettuce, onion, pickles, cheese, burger, smoked jalapenos, corn, olive oil, salt, pepper.

Now, the local ingredients:

Bread–fresh rolls/buns made by the husband (they were awesome, by the way.  Best yet, I think.)

Tomato, onion, corn–bought from local farmers at the local market

Burger–made of venison; from a deer killed by our friend this spring

Jalapenos–grown in a friend’s container garden, smoked on our grill

Pickles–cucumbers grown in my garden and pickled myself

And the non-local ingredients:

Mustard, cheese, lettuce, salt, and pepper–from Kroger

Olive oil–from Whole Foods

Quite frankly, I’m pretty proud of our home-grown, home-made meal.  I would love to declare the whole thing local, but can anyone really live without olive oil, mustard, salt, and pepper?  I can’t.  I also cannot live without cheese.  At least not for now.  I could have lived without the lettuce this time, though.  Although a burger with lettuce is better than one without, I could have lived without it.  Lesson learned there.

I encourge you to seek out your local farmers’ market (or road-side stand).  I think you’ll be surprised just how much you can find there and how tasty and ripe it is.  It might just get you out of a food rut and force you to try new foods and recipes–reason enough for me.

Check out how awesome that bun looks.  It tasted even better.  Yay for spouses who bake.

Look how pretty corn is when the husk is still there.