Pie Crust

in Comfort Foods Desserts Pie Time on 0 50 Views

A picture is worth a thousand words, or 774 to be exact, generated by the discovery of a cat wandering through the corner of a photo I accidentally took when learning how to use my tripod.  After Thanksgiving 2021, I remember fiddling around with my new tripod and struggling with the 90-degree arm.  I must have been testing the setup and lighting when I snapped this shot.  After taking hundreds of photos while preparing a recipe, I troll through the kaleidoscope of images in Lightroom.  I delete the pictures that are out of focus, to dark, or feature my son’s latest lego construction project.  How this photo was not deleted, I do not know.  But now that our beloved Bella has crossed the rainbow bridge, this photo has taken on new meaning.

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Pesto Pasta Salad

in Pasta Picnic Food Vegetarian on 0 45 Views

While this pasta salad has evolved over the years, it started as a means of using up leftover ingredients from a charcuterie plate. If I had to request a last meal, it would be a charcuterie plate with a bottle of Napa Cabernet. I just love a meat and cheese plate for dinner. It allows me to concoct several different permutations of meat, cheese, jam, honey, nuts, and fruit all in the same meal. The specialty crackers take it to the next level – with the charcoal, rosemary, and nut-laden crackers being among my favorites.

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Brown Butter Blueberry Poppy Seed Cake

in Breakfast Cakes Tea Party on 1 69 Views

Lucky for me, our summer vacation to visit my Aunt and Uncle in North Truro coincided with blueberry season. I was delighted to go wild blueberry picking near the dunes with their friend, Ira. We let some air out of the tires, and Ira drove us to his secret location. We were quickly enveloped in curtains of blueberry bushes the size of redwood trees. I entered “the zone” and began to pluck the large, vibrant berries from the bushes with methodical precision. Too much pressure and you could rupture the berry in your fingers. It was an artful dance to procure the ripest blueberries for pancakes and muffins. At the end of the morning, my stomach was almost as full of berries as my bucket.

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Green Goddess Slaw

in Picnic Food Salad Dressing Salads on 1 78 Views

The food Chicago offers, from a hot dog at Portillo’s to a re-imagined edible abstract painting dessert at Alinea, is magical and provides much needed inspiration for my culinary adventures when I return home. Sometimes, inspiration strikes when dining in a Restoration Hardware. This green goddess dressing was inspired by the Gem Lettuce Salad at the Three Arts Club within the Chicago Restoration Hardware. Yes, my favorite salad is served inside a furniture retailer. I beg you to trust me. This salad features baby gem lettuce, crumbles of feta cheese, thinly sliced radishes, and chunks of avocado all bathed in the herbiest buttermilk dressing.

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Chicken Pot Pie

in Comfort Foods Dinner Freezer Friendly on 1 53 Views

As the rainy spring days fade away and the summer heat envelops the South, my herbs struggle to find enough shade and water to prevent wilting. A small snip here and there for a sauce, biscuit, or soup leaves my herbs looking like a four-year-old accidentally found a pair of kitchen shears. This chicken soup is packed with herbs from my garden and showcases some of my favorite herbs in the garden. While not as delicious as my mother’s chicken pot pie, this one will do.

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Lasagna

in Comfort Foods Italianish Make-in-Bulk & Freeze on 1 169 Views

For me, the Italian American classic weeknight dinner staple is inevitably intertwined with an orange cartoon cat. Perhaps the manufacturers behind Stouffers frozen lasagna had invested in the constant lasagna feeding frenzy present within nearly every Garfield episode in the late 1980s. If they weren’t behind all the direct consumer marketing, then they should have been because I requested lasagna more than my brother requested canned spinach (thanks Popeye). The lasagna of my childhood was mostly noodles with marina and a small amount of cheese and meat sprinkled inadvertently throughout the layers upon layers of noodle.

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Truffle Potato Salad

in Picnic Food Sides Vegetarian on 1 217 Views

My husband loves anything truffle.  Truffle butter, truffle salt, truffle eggs, and my truffle potato salad.  He also doesn’t discriminate with his truffles.  He loves all truffles equally, even gleefully claiming that he would bath in anything truffle. Two of our favorite people, Marina and Dave, used to live on the same block as Urbani Truffles in New York City.  When we visited one December, during white truffle season, we made the oh-so-easy pilgrimage to Urbani.  We opened the doors and were immersed in truffle.  Everything smelled of truffle.  I think my husband’s glasses fogged over with truffle shavings.   It was his food heaven. 

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