Food Photos

Barbecued Brisket

Cooked in the oven and finished on the grill.  The cooking sauce was processed with an immersion blender and served on the side.

Sweet Corn and Basmati Rice Salad with Pecans and Watercress

I used to take this salad to Easthampton for 4th of July house party.  Serves a crowd, keeps, well, and the pecans and watercress make it special.  Finally found watercress at Whole Foods in Legacy Place, averting disaster.

Mascarpone Tart with HOney, Oranges and Pistachios from Bon Appetit

So easy and so rich and delicious.  Uses a dairy case pie crust, but of course, you could make your own.  Try it with blood oranges.  Yowza! 


The salad and the tart recipe links  are in the previous blog entry.  If you try them, let me know how you fared.


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Yet Another Summer Menu

It's cold in the Boston area this week and rainy today.  Yesterday I was a weeding fool, because the ground was so wet from Friday's rain and the weeds surrendered their roots with ease.  The wildflower garden looked so much better.  Damned chipmunks are digging everywhere, and something is eating the leaves of the marigolds, which I planted to DETER the bugs.  Mysterious.

We're have a friend for dinner tomorrow, and the menu is thus:

Broiled stuffed mushrooms

Barbecued Brisket

Sweet Corn and Basmati Rice Salad

Green Salad

Bread

Orange Mascarpone Tart with Pistachios

 Stuffed Mushrooms are almost a cliché but they're so tasty.  And easy.  And cheap!  The brisket is huge.  It is mostly cooked indoors then put on the grill to brown.  Good idea, due to the weather forecast.   The sweet corn and basmati rice salad is one of my summer faves.  The dessert is so tasty AND pretty and can be made with a dairy case pie crust.  

Yes!  

Off to cook up a storm.  I'll provide photos tomorrow.  


Links to recipes:  Mascarpone tart with honey, oranges and pistachios 

Sweet Corn and Basmatic Rice Salad  

The mushroom recipe does not appear to be on the Web, nor does the brisket.  There are plenty of recipes for oven cooked brisket (finished on the grill), but I'll have to (grrrr!)  key in the mushrooms.  The thing about them is that they have absolutely 100% ordinary, i.e. cheap ingredients, and offer some choices.  They're delicious, too.  All you need is mushrooms and stuff from your pantry. 

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Ready for a cleanse?

By the end of the holiday weekend, I'm almost tired of food.  We had finally had enough turkey and wandered over to the Longhorn Steakhouse for lunch.   I was privileged to get the first delicious cut of prime rib out of the oven.  Significant Other had a rack of ribs.  Instead of a starch, I ordered the veggies, and with the salad and the fact that I brought home a lot of meat it wasn't a total diet buster, because the holidays in general are a diet buster.

We're moving on to chicken breasts and low-cal soups for the rest of the week.  Whenever we have Soup Week, I always lose a couple of pounds.  I think a nice chicken piccata  will work tomorrow.  By the way, here is my dessert I served on Friday.  It is so delicious and also beautiful and easy to make.  Doesn't get any better than that.

Orange Mascarpone Tart with Pistachios and Honey

Any dessert this week will have to be fruit salad.  Hey, nothing wrong with that.  I love a good fruit salad, and each season has its prime fruits.  A spoonful of booze always livens up the salad, too.  I like Apfelkorn or an orange liquor.   The crust in the recipe above, by the way, is Pillsbury by way of the dairy case.  They are remarkably good for a supermarket crust.

Here is a link to the recipe

Back to the edits of my book.  It's interesting that when the first draft is completed, the author herself gets a better sense of what the book is actually about.   This will be the subject of another post.

Keep your date with the treadmill tomorrow.,

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Blogging While Drunk

Well, not drunk, exactly, just with a nice healthy slug of rum under one's belt and the large economy-sized glass of red wine with dinner.

Dinner! What can I say? Homemade pizza, with all fresh ingredients, and it tasted soooo good. Lots of cherry tomatoes, fresh broccoli, mushrooms, onions, garlic, yellow pepper,pepperoni, and three cheeses: fontina, mozzarella and parmesan. So good, so incredibly good.

And dessert! Youzza! Mascarpone tarte with fresh orange and honey and those little green nuts, whattamacallems. That's how much to drink. Pistachios. Recipe from Bon Appetit.

Pizza is my own concoction with dough from Roche Brothers. There's no comparison with store bought.

Feeling mellow. Leaving on a short trip to Atlanta tomorrow. Taking books along. Weather there much like here, so no difficult clothing decisions.

I've discovered one can wear the same clothes day after day and he world does not implode. But---my nice bear pajama bottoms from Coldwater Creek are wearing out. Also a couple pair of socks. I'm trying to see how long I can go without buying anything. One year? Two years? How long? Until one is in tatters. Too many clothes.

Until later,

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