Eat Life Up!

Hi followers, I am looking at creating a new blog series so this may well be my last post under the Recipes Road trips and Renovations guise. I want to take a minute to thank my friends, family and followers ~ who stretch as far as New Zeland, Russia and North Dakota....it is petty humbling! I appreciate you being with me when I left that secure job and when I drove thru that snow storm in Wyoming; and when I returned from the road with my 'what the hell have I done melt done'... It has been a long, scenic drive.

I hope you will look for my next series and continue to follow my culinary and narrative journey! Now, all I can think to do in return is to cook this dinner for you...

I am serving up Herb Roasted Chicken with Whipped Butternut Squash w/ Parmesan and Garlic, Spring Cottage Cheese Salad and then Watermelon for dessert! A perfect, Welcome to Spring Dinner!

We will start with the butternut squash, because it takes the longest to cook.

I place them each in their own foil wrap, but don't fully close the wrap, then place in 350 degree oven.

Then I get started on the chicken. Olive oil, salt and pepper to coat,

Now take the lemon, herbs (use sprigs here) and garlic and appropriately stuff all that into the cavity of the bird.

Then take some of the herbs and chop them and rub the remaining herbs all over the little guy

I add some water, more herb sprigs and a chopped lemon to the bottom of the broiler, then place the bird on top, and put in that 350 oven and cook for 1 and ½ hours.

When time is nearing, I take out the squash and let it cool briefly, then mix with the butter, cheese and salt and pepper,

Then you can put it all back into the skins to use as serving dishes!

Then, rinse your green onions, green pepper and tomato,

Chop at least two green onions, half the pepper and one tomato (or more or less of either depending on what you like).

Then blend with your cottage cheese. I can't remember if I learned this from Gail Childress or her daughter, Leesa; but either way they deserve the credit for this yummyness. People are always surprised by it! And it is so simple.

Now it is time to bring it all to the table,

I just think this is a perfect Springtime meal...add a few dinner roles to make sandwiches with the leftovers. The Squash acts as a condiment in that case.

Recipe to follow:

Herb Grilled Chicken

1 small whole chicken

8 fresh sprigs of thyme

8 fresh sprigs of sage

2 whole lemons, quartered

salt

pepper

olive oil

Butternut Squashed

1 large butternut squash, halved and seeded

½ cup grated Parmesan cheese

½ stick butter

salt

pepper

Spring Cottage Cheese Salad

16 ounces cottage cheese

2 sprigs of green onions, chopped

½ green pepper

½ roman tomato

salt

pepper

I would dress the table with my best china, and put out the best mason jars and the good wine.

Because that is how much I appreciate you taking this journey with me.

Again, please look for me in a new blog coming soon...what I have learned so far is that choosing happiness takes a lot of courage; good friends, great family and an amazing dog are essential ingredients; and I like words with my food!

Take Care & Eat Life Up!

Girl Meets Grille

As a girl who knows way too much about sports and is a master organizer of tailgate feasts, I have recently toyed with the idea of writing a recipe book of sorts that doubles as an instruction manual for understanding the gridiron. For example, explaining to the ladies, and IT male professionals, what a Pick Six is; or the difference between a linebacker and a running back. All the while teaching one how to throw the ultimate tailgate party. In doing this project I would need to be a grille master. But it occurred to me that in my experience, I always prepare the meat and there is a man at the grille to actually cook it ~ at our tailgates it is always my brother. So I am not sure if I even know how to grille. I mean I am allowed to turn the chicken or check the dogs from time to time throughout the tailgate day but I am not the start to finisher. I have certainly observed enough over the years so lets see what I can put into practice.

I have a very large grille in proportion to being a party of one.

I bought it a couple of years ago for Tailgate. We had gotten to where we were bringing two and three grilles and I thought this would cover all of our needs. It did not. So alas I have it to grille my tiny single person burgers on and the occasional chicken wing indulgence. On a side note I put this grille together with the help of my nieces Katie and Jessica...Girl Power!

For today's endeavor, I gather my supplies. I have some charcoal left over from last year; and by leftover I just mean the bag was opened then we never used the rest of it...not leftover in the grille. I have some lighter fluid and matches. I think I am ready.

I put in a layer of coals.

Pour on my lighter fluid then light'er up!

 After the flames die down...the coals don't seem to be catching so I douse them again...

Yea, I get the appeal!

Meanwhile I will get my meal together. Today we are having Rosemary and Garlic Red Potatoes; Prosciutto Wrapped Asparagus and Rib-eye Steaks...

Clean your red potatoes; then gather your rosemary and garlic. I get mine from my porch!

Then coat your potatoes in olive oil and toss with the rosemary, garlic and salt and pepper.

I wrap them in foil and then put them on the top rung of the grille. Is it called a rung? Let them get a 20-30 minute start on everything else. It really depends on the size of your potatoes.

I rinse the asparagus, lightly sprinkle it with olive oil as well, salt and pepper and then wrap the servings in the prosciutto.

So they are all hanging out on the top rung. We are going with rung.

After about 15-20 more minutes I get the steaks.

I am just going to brush them with olive oil and coat is salt and pepper.

The coals look perfect...I think!

I do two-three minutes on each side and get a medium rare – to medium end product.

It looks and smells so good I suddenly think, wait ~ maybe there is a recipe book called “Don't You Wish You Were My Boyfriend” in my future!!  

Please tell me what you think!

   

Recipes, Roadtrips and Renovations: Time and Place Pasta

Recipes, Roadtrips and Renovations: Time and Place Pasta

Time and Place Pasta

I remember the first time I cooked for a boyfriend. It was a pasta dish with a Tarragon white wine cream sauce tossed with seared shrimp and scallops. I realize now this may be why I am still single. My timing with food has always been off. When you are a 19 year old boy you like hamburgers and fries or maybe a steak and loaded baked potato. You get your vegetable rations of the Pyramid by eating salad with Ranch dressing.

I decided to bring out this dish again and see if it was just a mature palate that it needed. I have been rejected by a total of 11 male run restaurants where I have offered to wash dishes in exchange for food prep cooking experience in their establishment. I am guessing I need to get to work on some grilling skills. So, lets have one last hooray with a Lenten version of this pasta dish. I have a feeling it has a future in my female run establishment!

I wash some fresh asparagus; halve a lemon and gather my dried tarragon, cracked pepper, half n half and dry white wine. I use half n half because I already have it on hand for my coffee. But you can use whipping cream or milk. I already have wine on hand because I am a single 40 something year old living out in the middle of no where. I have to use dried tarragon for the same reason; though I don't think the herb really discriminates on age and sex.

The garlic minced (about two small cloves), a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of flour (for thickening) starts the pan off. Then Tarragon is added; about a teaspoon. An 8 oz glass of Wine is added after about a minute. Then add your cup of cream and a few swirls of cracked pepper, a pinch of salt and a ¼ cup of shaved cheese such as Parmesan.

Cook the pasta (enough for two servings) – I like bow tie for this dish; don't rinse when done so the pasta will hold the sauce. Then I saute the asparagus in olive oil and super thin sliced garlic.

In the end I combine everything and top with more shaved cheese and cracked pepper!

It looks pretty good; and it tastes pretty darn great! I can say, at 19 I didn't knew about the idea of butter and flour to thicken so this was probably a pretty runny sauce that first go around...thanks Chad for eating it anyway...! (I re-ran this recipe for Greg years later after I learned some refinements; but he was such an ass I wish he had been the beginning tester of when I was learning the dangers of salmonella ~ ah, how food is a memory).

It has occurred to me that I make a lot of dishes that recommend you accompany them with crusty bread and a mixed green salad; so I will work on that for future posts. I will also work on food fit for the 40 (or 30ish~ :)) something year old boyfriend as I am sure he is just on the other side of the pasta isle; probably somewhere in the grilling section!

And Ladies, if you don't have pasta or a man in your life; then I pray you have one of these:

A New Take

I am attempting a new take on an old standard. The St. Patrick's day staple of corned beef and cabbage. With pale skin, red hair and freckles it is no secret I am Irish. But I have never understood why my people settled on a signature dish of boiled meat. And if it has to be a boiled dish why can't it be the Dublin Lawyer or Dressed Crab?

Alas I have spent the past 7 years opening my front door to the familiar knock of my mother's fist roll to be greeted with a Tupperware filled with her leftover boiled corn beef, red potato, carrot and cabbage mixture. And for the past 7 years I have surmised that I am just not a big fan of this dish. It is no reflection of my mother's cooking ability; though that has been brought into question over the years. There was the liver topped with tomato sauce and American cheese slices announced as Veal Parmesan after all. But what she does with the corned beef and cabbage is no different from what anyone else who is reading the directions on the corned beef packaging is doing. It occurs to me this may be why so much alcohol is consumed on St. Patty's Day.

So, I am going to tackle this corned beef and cabbage on my own terms and see if it gets any better.

I have my corned beef and my “cabbage” - Brussels sprouts - and some Irish beer of course.

I can't really decide what to do with the sprouts but I know just what to do with the beef and beer. I brown my beef in olive oil and crack some pepper over the meat.

Then, I add the beer and a bay leaf or two or three.

Then I cover and place in a 325 degree oven for 1.5 hours.

Now on to what to do with the “cabbage”...I look around the kitchen for inspiration and see a green apple. Surely we can do something with this combination...

I core and roughly chop the apple and saute it with a shallot.

Then I add my equally roughly chopped sprouts with some of the juice from the meat cooking and a little bit of cider vinegar, like a half of teaspoon.

Wow this is really starting to come together!

When it is time to take the meat out, I let it set for a few minutes. I plate the sprout/apple combo then top with slices of the beef.

And it just looks like it is missing something...

So I add 1 teaspoon flour and 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard to the remaining beer/beef juices and make a yummy sauce...

OK, that is much better! I did have to be careful since Corned Beef is already so salty, I did not add any salt throughout the dish. I am going in for a taste...it is no Dublin Lawyer, but I like the new take on the boiled standard I have been eating for years! I would love to know what you think??

I would end this with May the Luck of the Irish be With You; but I have never understood that saying either...as history tells us, we Irish have had some pretty unlucky times. Another testament to being known for our whiskey and beer I suppose!

  

Stuck In A Moment

I am one of those annoying people who stick a CD in the car and it plays for weeks, months even. Right now it is the U2 All That you Can't Leave Behind CD. The song Stuck in a Moment That You Can't Get Out Of is stuck in my life and I may or may not be too happy about it.

I have a Saturday off for the first time in 3 months. A girlfriend from my teen years was supposed to be coming into town and I had three different scenarios planned out for us. We were going to eat, drink and meet boys in at least two of the three. But she fell ill to a stomach bug. So she wasn't up for a St. Patrick's Day night on the towns.

In her not coming for a visit, I see what a moment I am struck in. A few tears fell after I hung up the cancellation phone call because I realized how small my life has become and how much I count on the Moments I plan for and look forward too.

On the contrary, my house is clean for the first time in months; my fridge is clean for the first time in even more months and trash, Goodwill boxes, and excess baggage are ready to haul off. So maybe I should make plans that fall through more often!

At any rate, I have a change of plans. I now spend my evening trying to figure out how to get this:

To look like this:

I pureed spinach, olive oil and garlic, salt and pepper; then added that to melted butter and a little lime juice. Once I wrestled the meat from the shell, I found that spinach butter to be the the perfect fix to that moment I was stuck in.

Sometimes plans work out for you and more often they don't. That is just how life works.

So here is what I learned today. Look for something you can turn from This to That so you don't get stuck in a moment. I was going to dinner at Bob's Small Town Grille or maybe drink wine and listen to live music at Boutier Winery; but when those plans fell through, I made up a possible upcoming menu item for the restaurant of my dreams. Suddenly, I don't feel so stuck!

Friends With Fowl

When I was growing up I had a horrific relationship with chickens. I was a mere 3 ish and we were visiting relatives on their Connecticut farm. I was attacked by a 3 foot tall Rhode Island Red Rooster.  I don't know if he was jealous of my equally blazing red hair or he was just looking to pick on someone his own size; but there is a faint scar on my right cheek to mark the occasion.

A couple years latter I was planted on a farm in the Northwestern part of North Dakota where we raised pigs. Which may very well be where I began my love affair with bacon and slow cooked pork. We also had a few cows and what seemed like to me an unusually cruel amount of chickens.

As family life on a farm goes, we were all strapped with a slew of chores. I tried to navigate towards weeding in the garden, clearing rocks from the potato fields or slinging slop to the pigs; but occasionally my number would come up to feed the chickens. This would be an event I would stress over; right up there with does Phillip Baradi like me and will lemon juice really make these freckles go away!

The chicken and I were like a mosquito and the Gerber Baby; no matter where I was on the farm the rooster would find me and chase me. It was like a cartoon where my red hair was a laser attachment to the bird. My big brother found great joy in the whole thing and would out wit me and side with the rooster every time – like when I would run to the house for refuge; he would ensure the door was locked. We lived in North Dakota for God's sake – the only time our door was ever locked was to torture me! The chicken coop was attached to a garage and I would literally take a ladder and climb up the far side of the garage, walk across the roof of the garage and throw the food over the coop from the roof to avoid being seen by the rooster. But the damn bird would be waiting for me at the bottom of the ladder when I got back across the roof.

The whole experiment turned into a life long fear of all things fowl. When the Robins make there homes in my ferns on the front porch; I exit out the back. When I go to the zoo with kids and they want to see the Bald Eagle show I fain allergies. When a sparrow mistook my open screen door for an invitation; I hid in my car and called the landlord. The only consolation prize in the whole relationship has been the fact that I can cook chicken!

Today we are making braised, boneless chicken thighs w/ lime garlic buttered broccoli.

 Mise en place:

Skinless, boneless chicken thighs – seasoned w salt and pepper

olive oil

a couple of celery stalks, sliced

a shallot, sliced

about 25 mini carrots cut in half

½ lemon, quartered

sprig of Rosemary

a couple of sprigs of Parsley

3 cloves of garlic

broccoli florets

butter

¼ cup of white wine

½ cup of chicken broth

Chop your celery, carrots, shallot and press two cloves of garlic,

Add to pan with heated olive oil and lemon, rosemay and parsley

  

then add chicken, wine and broth, and a little more salt and fresh cracked pepper.

                             

Cover with lid or foil and place in 350 degree oven for 2 hours.

Once you remove it from the oven remove the thighs and place on your serving tray to rest. Then, remove the vegys, leaving the juices to make your sauce.

All you need to do is add some butter and flour to thicken the juices.

This is soooo yummy!

Now, you should have been steaming your broccoli just before making the sauce, so everything times out on time. Remember to immerse your broccoli in an ice bath after they have steamed to stop the cooking; this keeps the rich green color.

 For the lime garlic butter,

Melt butter with a small clove of garlic and about a ¼ teaspoon of lime zest or ½ teaspoon of lime juice.

Then you are ready to plate,

Delicious! Broccoli is so good for you and chicken thighs are so full of flavor, probably from all that chasing the freckle faced red head all those years!

Lydia's on a Budget

Lydia's on a Budget

I have recently, as we all have, had to make changes to my budget. I no longer have Satellite TV so can no longer learn my cooking skills from Food Network or Bravo. In this financial crisis I have learned what a waste of money that whole DISH Network nonsense was to begin with. All I have ever needed for TV viewing has been some rabbit ears and TaDa ~ I have FOX for Football and American Idol; CBS for March Madness and Sunday Morning; NBC for Jimmy Fallon and Brian Williams; and PBS for everything else. PBS does so many things well, there is no doubt. But the cooking programs that air are really the best. I don't care what Anthony or Guy tell you.

One of my all time favorites over the years has been Lydia's Italy. I learn so many things from her the least of which to always pour some wine while cooking. Recently she had an episode where she shared this Dover Sole w/ lemons and capers recipe and I remember being fascinated by the fact that she ate the lemon slices with her bites of sole at the end when she was oohing and ahhing at her finished product. I also remember she had went to the docks pick out her fish. I don't have that luxury here; I just have Ingles. Ingles always has three types of fish on hand – Salmon, Tuna and Tilapia. I long for the day I can go to the market and ask my fish monger for his freshest catch, a las that is not today. I choose Tilapia and set out to create my own version of Lydia's dish. Its the Sharyn's Danielsville rendition if you will. Tilapia is delightfully inexpensive and adding spinach and tomatoes rounds out a very healthy dish, even if there is a little butter and cream.

Here is what you will need for four servings:

4 Filets of Tilapia

1 lemon super thinly sliced

1 ½ tblsp capers

8 oz of dry white wine

1 tblsp ground peppercorns

1 tspn salt

1/3 cup olive oil

1 large clove garlic; minced

4-6 Campari tomatoes; quartered

½ cup heavy cream

1 tblsp diced shallot

black pepper and salt

½ stick of butter

12 oz of fresh spinach

First, rinse and pat dry your Talapia filets. Then, lather in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, salt, ground pepper, the dry white wine, and the capers.

I let this sit in the fridge for 30 minutes or so.

Then, you can throw in the tomatoes and re coat with some olive oil and salt and pepper just on the tomatoes.

Then place in a 375 degree oven for 20-30 minutes. Or until it looks like this, nice flaky filets:

Then, you can just take the spinach and top; the heat from the fish resting will help wilt the spinach.

After a few minutes, you are ready to plate.

I then use the left over sauce from the cooking pan to make a beurre blanc sauce by adding the butter, then the cream and continually whisking - this takes less then a minute. You could also reserve 3-4oz of the wine and reduce with a tspn of vinegar and your shallots, then add the butter and cream to that and eventually add it to the juices from the fish. Including the juices from the cooked fish provides the best flavor:

Pair it with some good bread for drinking up the sauce and you will wonder why you don't always dine in Sharyn's Danielsville!