Pickles!!

Gave refrigerator pickles a try tonight! We'll have to wait and see if the turn out to be any good, but from the lovely aroma of the boiling spices, they are promising! The cucumbers are from NJ (Thanks, Mom Marshall!), the onion from Boston Organics. Can't wait to give these a try.

Totally Locally Sourced!

There are so many things that I would like to write about, but I just don't have the energy. But! I want to share what we had for dinner tonight:



Completely locally sourced! Right down to the tomato basil farmers cheese we used to flavor the potatoes. NOM. The beef was from Lionette's in South Boston and was really good. Grass fed beef tastes so different! I really hadn't expected that, but I guess I didn't know what to expect. I'm hoping that we can make locally sourced meat a more consistent part of our diets for ethical, environmental and health reasons. And because it's good! Hopefully more on this later!!

Amazing Year

I can’t believe that 367 days ago, Kyle and I got married!

This has truly been the greatest year of my life, and as Kyle said at our special anniversary dinner Saturday night, “Here’s to 70 more!”

For our anniversary, we spent a lovely weekend relaxing in Portland, ME. Portland was our stateside jumping-off point for our honeymoon to Nova Scotia and, while we thought that the city looked like a lot of fun, we didn’t have time last year to really explore.

Given that Kyle is a very patient man, he didn’t mind that I found a very local-friendly, well reviewed restaurant for our celebratory dinner – even when we had to take a 9:45pm reservation. Eating so late let us entertain the delusion that we’re not quite as old as we pretend when we’re at home. I actually found the restaurant by doing a search on LocalHarvest.

And so we ended up at Fore Street, and had one of the very best meals that I have ever had. Oh. My. Gosh. The FOOD!! It was SO good, and not just because we were eating so close to my bedtime. For whatever reason, the only pictures I have are from my phone and they don’t even begin to convey how amazing everything was.

We started dinner with a tomato goat cheese tart (very generous on the goat cheese which endeared me to them immediately) so good that I would consider having it for every meal for the rest of my life and I’m sure I wouldn’t get sick of it. Next came the main courses of yummy yummy Gulf of Maine halibut for me and Maine-raised venison for Kyle. We also got Maine garlic mashed potatoes and green beans almondine which were the least impressive offering of the night, though still good.

But the real achievement of the evening was dessert. There are not words for how good this dessert was, suffice to say that not only did I eat sweet corn ice cream, it was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever had and I can’t wait to figure out how to make it at home and eat it until my stomach pops like the Gluttony guy in 7even.

Dessert was a blueberry shortcake (really a cream puff covered in blueberries) served with the aforementioned sweet corn ice cream of awesomeness.

It truly was a perfect meal. I can’t express how blessed I am to have such a wonderful partner and I hope that we will have 70 more years of wonderful meals to celebrate this life we are building together.

Happy Farmers Market Chicken

Who knew that a naked, slightly shriveled, little chicken sitting in a bag of brine in our fridge would completely occupy my thoughts for an entire workday? That I would be overcome with the anticipation of my first whole chicken roasting adventure that meaningful work would be hard to come by? I sure hope that our dinner guests tonight understand the gravity of the situation but given that they are kind and loving souls, I’m sure that they will neither laugh at my enthusiasm nor think me insane. But that’s just because, at this point, they know that I’m insane.

The chicken obsession took root last weekend while visiting my parents. My mom started a job in VT recently as has been raving about the Norwich Farmers Market for months now. I was very eager to visit as we rarely have the leisure time to wander farmers markets in our area (most are during the work week and end at 6pm so when we have gone we’re usually racing around to snap thing up before everything gets shut down). Plus it was a lovely excuse to have my mom and aunt show off their still newish home and for us to get some quality time together.

I went in with a plan, and for the most part stuck with it. I’ve been increasingly interested in finding humanely raised meats for our diet but because of convenience issues haven’t put too much effort into actually following through with this. The farmers market was the perfect opportunity to get started following through on this! Many vendors had free range chickens, organic eggs and grass fed beef and my mom even picked up some Guinness elk sausages for Kyle and my dad. (I tried the elk and it was good, but one bite was enough.) After a completely humiliating encounter with one chicken vendor (I certainly didn’t know that we were talking whole chickens at first, although that seems pretty stupid in retrospect. Not to worry, I ran away from her to a much kinder woman with more reasonably priced poultry), I was the beaming owner of my very own 3.19lb whole roaster. YAY!

With friends coming for dinner tonight, I decided that it was the perfect time to debut the bird. I really have no idea if this is going to work or not but I’m hoping that the waxed beans with mint and steamed broccoli (also from the Norwich F.M.) will be enough if the roasting goes terribly wrong. I’m also planning blondies for dessert. I figure that if all else fails, putting guests into a sugar coma is as good a way as any to end an evening.

***

So, thinks went relatively well. But I've learned several valuable lessons.
1.) Cooking past my bed time isn't a great idea. I ended up brining the chicken's butt all day instead of the breast.
2.) I have no freaking idea how to carve a chicken. Next time I'll look that up before mutilating the bird before our horrified guests.
3.) 3.19lbs of chicken is not enough for 4 adults when the hostess is incapable of getting all the meat off the bones and nobody likes legs.
4.) Anything with a stick of butter and cup of brown sugar is sure to be delicious. The blondies were soooo good!

Overall, I'm really pleased at my first roasting attempt! Now to perfect my technique and make some chicken stock!

Summer of Food

Last Christmas I received Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and read it just as fast as I could shouting out things to Kyle like, “We are totally going to raise chickens! YAY chickens!” “Can we somehow convert our concrete hole of a yard into a garden this year??” and, “I’m so totally going to make CHEESE in the KITCHEN.” Needless to say, I was more than a little intrigued/enthused/consumed by the entire notion of eating locally. It just makes a lot of sense. Without going into it much here, I’ll just say that the book is a must read and has left me craving a small farm in Appalachia a bit more than the next girl.

It was the cheese in the kitchen comment that really caused Kyle to throw on the brakes and declare that perhaps I should slow down before attempting to turn our fairly urban apartment into an 1800s homestead. So I spent the next several months eating take out four nights a week and putting off any local eating experiments until the weather turned warm and their was local fair to be had. (Actually, my take out shame spiral had nothing to do with the cheese-free kitchen edict and everything to do with the fact that my job search was dragging on and leaving me more than a little down about it).

But the spring brought gainful employment and a rededication to the idea that trying to find ways to eat locally would be awesome and was something that I just had to do. Right. Now. And after several months of working on this, I’m feeling compelled to record the attempt here. Blogging has never stuck for me. Just as I have horrifyingly embarrassing middle school journals that are all false starts, lamenting about boys and declarations that, “this time I am determined to keep writing here!” that were abandoned after days, so too has this blog been one false start after another. The difference is, this time I don’t care. Right now I feel like sharing our food adventures, so I will. If tomorrow I change my mind, OK!

That being said, the biggest thing to get the ball rolling in terms of giving this a try was subscribing to Boston Organics. Boston Organics has always offered great organic fruits and veggies delivered to your door, but only recently have they started a locally sourced option, the Dogma box. For me, it was the local nature of the food that was the most important, not necessarily the fact that it’s organic (although that is awesome) so this is really the box for us. Every week we’re delivered local, organic, interesting produce that we then have to figure out 1.) what it is and 2.) how to consume it. This has been an awesome opportunity to learn to cook a variety of veggies we would have walked right past in the grocery store, to find out that I/we like some (kale, collard greens, cabbage) and that others aren’t as popular (Kyle finds eating baby bok choy to be the most cruel form of torture imaginable). It’s also helped me to remember that I love cooking and that take out is expensive and not very tasty. I’m spending far more time in the kitchen than I have in recent memory and I love it. While we still struggle to get through all the produce in one week (either freezing it for the winter or eating it all up) we’re getting much better at it and I’ve found a lot of joy in the attempt.

Much Needed Weekend Away

This past weekend, at the kind invitation of Jess, I escaped from the city for an amazing weekend at SPA in Freeport, ME. It would be an understatement to say that I needed this time away with wonderful, funny women and an abundance of cheese and wine. 

The past few weeks have been particularly hard in terms of dealing with my the anxiety of my job search and the frustration and sadness about still not finding work in my new field had really been wearing on me. It's not that I didn't think the search would be hard, it's just that I never thought the search would drag on so long. When I first starting looking for post-graduation work, the economy was just smoldering a bit at the edges, having not yet so thoroughly gone up in flames. And somewhere in the long stretches of not having to get our of my pajamas or put on makeup, I started to forget how blessed I am to have job at all, let alone one that allows me to be a part of such an amazing community and to work with people that I truly love. I now feel like a complete idiot for being so sulky, but I think this sort of thing can creep up on all of us now and then.
So to say that I had high hopes for my weekend away would again be putting it lightly. I had hoped that weekend would somehow snap me out of the doldrums and I was not at all disappointed! Just the overall sense of camaraderie and the infectious laughter made me so happy that I had tagged along for the ride. Meeting new, wonderful people and getting to know friends even better over a glass of wine or decadent snack buoyed me and certainly made me feel like I belonged. And I am so glad that I took the plunge and decided to get a drop spindle! Many, many thanks for Amy and Adrian for their instruction and encouragement! And then, I made yarn!! Here's the proof.

It's one of the 4 pictures I managed to take this weekend and it just makes me smile.
So to all the lovely ladies that made this weekend so fun and who know just how to get in the perfect amount of trouble, THANK YOU!! You're all getting hugs at knitting night next week, whether you want them or not! ;)

Adventures in Baking

For Christmas, Kyle's parents gave my the Sweet Melissa Baking Book and since we've been *trying* to eat healthier, I've satisfied my sweet tooth by just reading the lovely recipes. Oh my gosh, they all look amazing!

Last weekend, Kyle, Janet and I piled into the car with the puppies and headed to my parent's house so that Kyle and Jan could ski. Given my terror of heights and of chairlifts in particular, skiing is not for me. At all. So I stayed home and finally cracked open the cookbook for some special Valentine's Day baking.
I personally think that the name of the holiday should be changed to "Eat Your Weight In Chocolate Guilt Free Day!" but I'm not sure it will catch on.
I decided to go with the "Fallen Souffle Cake" given my chocolate love and desire to learn a new culinary technique. I've never really worked with eggs in any fancy way before so I was particularly excited to learn how to make a meringue and was overjoyed when, with a lot of assistance from my Aunt Val, my eggs formed soft peaks! So cool! Sadly, the cake ended up being a bit overdone but it was still delicious, if not as pretty as it could have been. I can't wait to try the other amazing sounding treats from this book! So pleased!! Here's the entire process:

Chocolate Souffle Cake