Drawings of Food: Corn Dog

I like corn dogs.

DRAWINGS OF FOOD: BLT WITH DRY FARMED TOMATOES & HOMEMADE BACON

My friend Erica Jones put up a picture of a BLT she had for dinner the other day. I decided to draw this piece of food. That piece of bacon on top of the sandwich looks delicious. I tried to get the glistening oil just right, but may have fallen short. It may be impossible to truly capture the beauty of bacon in any artform other than actually putting bacon in my mouth.

San Marzano - New York City

 San Marzano - On a recent visit to New York Bob and I got to experience this great pizza place not once, not twice, but three times!  That's right, we liked it so much that we ate there three times and loved it each and every time.  On a previous trip to NYC we'd come across San Marzano, but we'd only stopped in for a drink.  

The restaurant is on the corner of Rivington and Clinton in the Lower East Side.  Like many NYC establishments they have floor to ceiling windows that they can open up on warm summer days to get a nice cross breeze.  The restaurant seats about 34 people, including the 4 seats at the bar.  There's typically one waiter, and some awesome cooks.  This is important because while the place is small, you should probably not go here if you're in a rush.  This is a leisurely paced meal kind of place, and the corner location is great for people watching.

But what about the food you ask!  So all together we tried: the antipasto platter, the brussel sprouts, the arugula salad, the buffalo chicken pizza, the finocchio pizza and the caption pizza.  That's right, we totally went for it when it came to eating.  We paired all our delicious food with Strawberry Abita in frosty mugs.  YUM! 

We discovered that one pizza, and an appetizer (salad, antipasto, etc) was enough for the two of us to be nicely satisfied with out being stuffed.  You can eat one pizza all by yourself, as it's thin crust and about 13 inches, but you'll be completely full.  I do recommend this if you want to try a bunch of different pizzas, and you're going out with a group of friends.

 

 

 

They have a nice deal during lunch for a Margherita Pizza for super cheap if you're just looking for an easy lunch.

Overall our favorite thing at San Marzano was the buffalo chicken pizza.  The chicken is shredded so it's covered all over the pizza, and it's just the right amount of spicy.  If you like buffalo wings, and you like thin crust pizza you should definitely try this place out.

:)M

Cauliflower Mushroom and Ham Soup

So, I've been trying to use our Blend-tec blender more often, and I've also been cooking with cauliflower more often as well because it's a nice texture/consistency to add flavors to.  My most recent concoction is a pretty hearty soup.  Now typically I am of the mind set that soup is not a meal.  It's more like a side dish or an appetizer, so I wanted to try to make a full meal kind of soup and here's what I came up with...

Ingredients:

Dried Black Eyed Peas

Ham

Cauliflower

Mushrooms

Garlic

Vegetable Stock

Onions

Cayanne Pepper

This recipe requires a bit more preparation than other things I've made, so I recommend that you being the first step of this meal after you eat dinner one night, so that you can get things ready for the next night's meal.

Step 1 - You need to soak your black eyed peas.  I soaked 1 cup of dried black eyed peas in 4 cups of water over night and into the next day.  (You don't have to soak them this long, but really it's not going to hurt them, you really need roughly 8 to 10 hours of soaking.)

 

Step 2 - An hour before you're going to eat drain your blacked eyed peas and add 2 cups of vegetable stock and put them on low/medium heat on the stove top.  Watch and stir every once and a while, making sure that the vegetable stock covers all your black eyed peas.

Step 3 - While the peas are cooking go ahead and wash and chop up a head of cauliflower and throw it in

your steamer.  Do the same with about 2 cups of sliced mushrooms.  STEAM!!!! This takes about 20 minutes.

Step 4 - While your veggies are steaming, and your peas are cooking go ahead and get out a frying pan.  Chop up about 1/4 cup onions, a couple of cloves of garlic, and about 1 lb of ham into big chunks.  Add everything to your frying pan with a tiny bit of butter or olive oil and season with cayenne, salt and pepper.  Kind of push things around constantly so the ham doesn't stick and so that everything gets covered and cooked nicely.

Step 5 - Place your steamed veggies in the blender.  Drain the peas and pour the chicken stock they've been cooking in, in the blender as well.  BLEND!!!  AFter it's blended to the consistency you like pour the mixture back in the pot with the peas.   Stir in the ham, onions and garlic.  BAM, you're done!

When I made this I didn't have any really good ham in the house, so we just used sandwich meat, which was okay but big chunks of ham would have been so much better.

We had a bag o' salad with our soup, just to add more greens.  As another idea I think you could cook the ham with the peas if you really wanted to, rather than using a frying pan.  But who knows!

Enjoy!!!

 

 

 

Mama's Fish House

Mama's Fish House is DELICIOUS!  It's also amazingly beautiful and will make you feel like you're living in a Swiss Family Robinson or Robinson Crusoe.  The restaurant is a collection of old sails and weird ship-like things.  The entire restaurant is open air, there is a roof, but you can feel the cool breeze of the ocean throughout the restaurant, and there are gigantic oriental rugs all over the floor.  And the food is phenomenal!

We made reservations for lunch at 1pm, and lounged around until we needed to get to the airport - the airport is only about 10 minutes away from Mama's.  I was driving so I started off my meal with a virgin passion fruit daiquiri, and it was wonderful, not too sweet just perfect.  We ordered: the wasabi crusted calamari, lobster guacamole, and a sampling of their sashimi.  The wasabi calami was absolutely the best, it was cooked perfectly and had a nice citrus bite to it.  The sashimi sampler was neat because it was tuna, salmon and a white fish (can't remember which one) and each choose had it's own special kind of salt to go with it, which I thought was pretty awesome.   There's pink salt, who knew!  The lobster guacamole was good, but I think we could have done with out it.

We split our main course because we'd ordered so many of the appetizers and we wanted to save room for dessert.  We ordered the House Special which is Stuffed MahiMahi - Stuffed with lobster, crab and Maui onion, baked in a macadamia nut crust.  It was melt in your mouth delicious.  Order this, there's a reason it's the house special.

We were super full but couldn't help ourselves and still ordered dessert.  I had the chocolate pie, and a mocha.  Bob had the creme brûlée.  The mocha was HUGE, had I known how big it would be I wouldn't have ordered one, it was a dessert in itself, delicious but huge.  My chocolate pie was sooooo rich, Bob and I should definitely have shared it.  The creme brûlée was really good as well.  We just ordered way too much food, but it was so good so we kept eating ourselves into a food coma.  It's a good thing we had time to sit there and digest before going to the airport.

The food is a little more expensive but all the fish is caught that morning so it's super fresh, and our waitress was awesome.  Go here, it's worth every penny, you'll have a wonderful time.

 

Faux-babs, Salads and Cheesy Garlic Cauliflower Mash!

Tonight's dinner was pretty darn delish, and super duper easy to make.  I highly recommend you give it a try, you only need about an hour and then dinner will be on the table.

As an aside, I decided to make the cheesy garlic cauliflower mash because we're trying to be a little healither but at the same time I have a great love for potatoes, mashed potatoes in particular.  I read an article in the latest issue of Rachel Ray's cooking magazine about mashed cauliflower and it sounded sooo yummy so I thought we'd give it a try.

Okay, so before you begin you dinner of awesome you'll need to pick up your ingredients.

 

- meat!  (I usually plan on 1/2 lb per person and will typically choose tenderloin)

- 1/4 cup mushrooms

- 1/4 cup red pepper (you can use green but I feel like the green peppers have a really overpowering taste)

- 1/4 cup onion

- 1/2 a tomato

- seasoning!!! (I like Angelo's BBQ rub, it's awesome and super spicy!)

- 1 head of cauliflower

- 1/4 cup garlic jack cheese

- 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream

- 1tbsp butter

- 1 bag of whatever grocery store salad you'd enjoy

- salt and pepper to taste

- aluminum foil

- cookie sheet

- steamer

- blender

All right, so now that you have everything you need here's what you do.

Step 1 - Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees.  While the oven is heating up chop your onion, red pepper, tomatoes and mushrooms into large chunks.  (You can really throw any veggie you want in here.)  Go ahead and chop up your head of cauliflower and set it aside.  Now cut up your chosen meat into kebab sized chunks.

Step 2 - Lay our a large sheet of aluminum foil and place your large chunks of meat on your foil.  Toss your seasoning for the meat over the top of the chunks and roll them around a little to get them nice and coated.  Now place the mushrooms, onions, red peppers and tomatoes over the top of the chunks of meat and place another piece of foil over the top of your yummy creation.  Roll up all the sides of your aluminum steamer and place the foil steamer on the cookie sheet and place it in the oven.  (You'll let this cook for about 35 minutes.)

Step 3 - Butter the bottom of your steamer so it doesn't burn your cauliflower and toss your cut up cauliflower in the steamer and start it a' steaming!

Step - 4 While your cauliflower is steaming and your faux-babs are baking go ahead and clean up your mess, and then cut up about 1/4 cup of your garlic jack cheese.  Get out your blender and get ready.  Mix your bag o' salad and set aside.

Step 5 - Your faux-babs should be awesome, so pull the cookie sheet out of the oven and place it on top of the stove to sit for a minute.  Don't open the foil container yet though, wait until right before you serve it.  While the faux-babs are sitting toss your cauliflower in the blender with the garlic jack cheese and 1/4 cup of whipping cream, add some salt and pepper to taste and BLEND!!!!!  And now you're ready!

Serve and eat your awesome meal!!!!!

Surf - In New Hampshire

Bobicito and I are currently visiting New Hampshire to celebrate a new baby and a wedding.  We thought the best thing to do while here would be to eat some darn good seafood, and we have.  We checked out a new restaurant in Portsmouth called "Surf,"  it was delish!  We ordered way too much food, but loved almost all of it.

We started with the Parmesan-Fried Calamari - Tossed with parmesan cheese and cherry pepper vinaigrette.  We ate every last bite and it was so cheesy and good, it melted in our mouths.  I could have eaten an order all by myself and been perfectly happy.

Because we wanted to try a whole bunch of stuff we also ordered the on special tuna tartar, spicy ceviche, and raw lobster.  We were disappointed with the tuna tartar and spicy ceviche.  The tuna tartar had a weird olive tapanade and boiled egg, the olive tapanade was really overwhelming on the taste.  The spicy ceviche was the worst ceviche we've ever had.  It was like the restaurant took some mango pico di galio and then threw in some scallops with lemon juice.  It just didn't go together, and tasted really weird.    The lobster was of course delicious.

Bob had the Surf and Turf - Two grilled tenderloin medallions on chive mashed potatoes, topped with
two Jonah crab cakes, bearnaise sauce, and grilled asparagus.  The tenderloin medallions were cooked to absolute perfection, so good!  The crab cakes were not the best, but okay.   I think the crab cakes would have been better with a little more seasoning.

I had the Lobster Kristina - Steamed & shucked native lobster flambéed with cognac, lobster stock, chives, cream and butter, served with jasmine rice & grilled asparagus.  That lobster was absolutely delicious, we ate every last bit of it.

The price was actually pretty reasonable considering the amount of food we ate.  I'd recommend the calamari and the two different entrees we had, absolutely delicious.  The raw bar seemed to be hit and miss.

:)Margaret