Monthly Archives: June 2010

June 26, 2010 · 2:34 am

Summer Veggies Are My Salvation!

This summer is hot. For real. Its been a weird week- kind of busy but no energy and feeling blah. I get the sense everyone is feeling it, not just me. The two things that have kept me going this week (besides Grant and the doggers), though, are… fresh summer veggies and good music!

Last weekend we had a whirlwind of a road trip as we went to our friends Ali Marie & Dolan’s wedding celebration in the Shenandoah Valley. Virginia really IS for lovers. We had an amazing time with so many nice people and good food. Nothing says summer celebration better than welcoming the Solstice in with bluegrass tunes by a campfire with good friends! Oh, and our good friend George Dickel, he’s always fun at a party! We pitched our tent, had a quick night’s sleep, and were awakened by the most beautiful little chirping birds and the sight of these amazing little blue wildflowers! (Then on the way home we found. . . bum, bom, bohh. . . . . FOAMHENGE! See photos below!)

Last Saturday before we took off, we realized we had a bag of the most beautiful red and green okra I had found at The Turnip Truck earlier in the week. It had to be eaten. For the last couple of years, we have grown our own okra and always meant to pickle some but never did. This day, we realized just how easy it is to do so. Grant found a simple recipe online that went something like this:

1 qt white vinegar
1/2 cup sea salt
dash of organic raw sugar
1 cup water
fresh okra
dill
hot red peppers
hot green peppers (we used Anaheim)
garlic cloves

We sterilized the jars in boiling water, put the garlic, peppers, dill  in, stuffed them with washed okra, and then poured the water/vinegar mixture (which had been heated with salt and sugar) over top and sealed them up. The jars are in the refrigerator now and in one week, we can see how they taste. I was a little sad that the red okra lost most of its color when we poured the warm mixture over it but they still look beautiful!

I get so overwhelmed looking at fresh summer produce. There are so many possibilities and it all has so much potential. I’ll admit it, I am a food nerd. I often buy things because they are pretty or interesting looking and I think they will photograph well. I always eat it and it never goes to waste. This year, probably because of the blog, I have been buying more vegetables I am less familiar with. It becomes a challenge to try to figure out how to cook it. That’s sort of what happened with these baby turnips I got this week. They were so cute and perfect in shape. I also jumped on the yellow wax beans just because I rarely see them. I started to explore cookbooks and recipe sites to find the perfect recipe for either or both together but got lazy and kept it simple. I just used what we had and this is what I came up with (as I rediscovered my love for Lyle Lovett’s, The Road to Ensenada)-

Baby Turnips & Waxed Beans with Tomato Relish

small bunch of baby turnips
small bag of yellow wax beans
1/2 basket of cherry tomatoes
hand full of fresh basil from the garden
our first green pepper from the garden
1-2 tbsp good olive oil
1/2 tsp unsalted organic butter
1-2 tsp balsamic vinegar
sea salt

I cleaned and steamed the turnips for about 5 minutes and then added the beans. I steamed them for another 5 minutes maybe and then threw them in an iron skillet with a little olive oil and the butter on medium high heat to get them a little browned. I did not cook them long, maybe 5-10 minutes (both were still firm and crisp, the turnips seemed very potato-like). While these were cooking, I chopped the cherry tomatoes, green pepper and the basil and mixed it together with olive oil, the balsamic vinegar, and sea salt to make a little relish. I poured the turnips and beans in a bowl and topped with the relish. It was so simple yet tasted so fresh and delicious. We ate it with some baked lemon garlic chicken Grant concocted and it was perfect together. The next day, I had the leftover turnips & beans cold and it made the perfect healthy salad. Grant put some in a wrap with turkey. Ahhh… summer at its best!

That is all I have for now. But, I have lots and lots of fresh berries in the fridge and I plan to make many pies this weekend. The first Red Barn Round-Up of the season is on Sunday- the perfect mix of Southern cookin’ and old school country music!

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June 19, 2010 · 4:35 pm

Summertime

June 15th is Waylon’s Birthday so we had lots of Waylon tunes filling the air at our house this week. Also just out is Twistable, Turnable Man, a musical tribute to the late Shel Silverstein in which Bobby Bare, Jr. put together some great songs sung by some great folks and this, it turns out, is a fun summer album. It makes me happy.

The local organic tomatoes and blueberries have appeared and this, also, makes me very happy.

One of my favorite ways to enjoy these little tomatoes is to half them, spread them out on a cookie sheet, cover in olive oil and roast in the oven with garlic cloves. Then you can do all sorts of things with them! For this particular evening, I also roasted summer squash and asparagus, added fresh basil from our garden and then threw over pasta and topped it with Reypenaer 2 year aged Gouda cheese. Delicious.

We LOVE blueberries and they are so good for you. We eat them all by themselves, with plain yogurt, in smoothies, fruit salads or sometimes… I make my Mom’s famous Blueberry Crumble Top Pie!

Earlier in the week, we drove over to 12th South to wander around and see what was new. We stopped at the new Green Light Market which is next to the new Las Paletas location and the new, much talked about restaurant, Burger Up. The market is tiny but cute and friendly. They have yummy sounding sandwiches, homemade lavash crackers that are amazing,  local specialty items and some local organic produce.

We found some amazing English Peas. I did some recipe searches trying to figure out what I wanted to do with them. I really like this recipe on Heidi Swanson’s 101 Cookbook site and I found one other I really liked that was just a simple salad with Arugula and Pecorino Romano cheese and a couple other ingredients. I ended up sort of combining both recipes and came up with my own which we ate with some garlic and fresh basil roasted chicken in foil that Grant made.

My recipe went something like this…

Fresh Pea Salad
1 cup fresh mint leaves
2-3 tbsp Flame raisins
1-2 tbsp olive oil
1 small Anaheim pepper
a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and zest from that lemon
1 1/2 cups fresh peas
1 small head of romaine lettuce, cut into shreds
1/4 cup Parmesan Reggiano, cut in small pieces
fine grain sea salt

To make the mint dressing, puree the mint, raisins, chiles, olive oil, and lemon juice and zest using a food processor or hand blender. Blend until uniform in texture. Thin it out by adding a tablespoon of water so that it is a consistency in which you can drizzle over salad. Taste and adjust for lemon and spiciness.

Cook shelled peas in salted boiling water for no more than one minute. Immediately drain peas and place in a bowl of ice water to stop cooking process.

Just before serving gently toss the peas, lettuce, and cheese with about half of the dressing and a couple pinches of salt. Taste and add more dressing if you like.

Serves 2 – 4.

We used the leftovers in a sandwich wrap the next day!

Grant's chicken dish that accompanied the pea salad!

Also this week, I found some new and interesting cole slaw recipes. This one was particularly different and I have to admit that the thought of raw collard greens did not sound too appetizing to either Grant or myself. But, we tried it anyway and knew the raw vegetables would, if nothing else, be really good for our bodies. Surprisingly, we both really enjoyed it and were able to eat it with two very different meals this week. The first night we enjoyed it with a shrimp and Andouille sausage gumbo Grant made and the second night, we served it with Terriyaki salmon and some rice.

Collard and Cabbage Slaw
Ingredients:
1 bunch collards, stems removed and sliced very thin
1/2 small green cabbage, core removed and sliced very thin
1 large carrot, grated or julienned
3 green onions, white parts and some of the green, sliced thin on the diagonal
3 tablespoons fresh orange juice
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
2 teaspoons fresh ginger, finely minced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon salt or to taste
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

Combine collards, cabbage, carrots and onion in a large salad bowl. Toss until well mixed. Combine orange and lemon juices, ginger, garlic and salt in a small bowl. Slowly whisk in olive oil and continue to whisk until emulsified. Adjust seasoning to    taste. Pour dressing over greens and toss until greens are well coated.

This recipe I found on the PCC Natural Market website, our Seattle market when we lived there.

Collard & Cabbage Slaw with Gumbo and Scrabble!

Collard Slaw Again- with Salmon & Rice

Lots of good eats and fun country music coming up with a trip to friends’ wedding celebration in the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia and the first Red Barn Round-Up of the summer!!!

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June 13, 2010 · 5:59 am

Bluegrass Music and Japanese Noodles…

The first day of summer is over a week away but I feel as though we’ve already had a busy, hot summer! The air is quite thick and humid. The bugs are out in full force here in middle Tennessee although we have lots of lightning bugs so that makes it exciting and a little more friendly! And when the heat feels excessively strong and muggy, I just pretend I am in a sauna and my pours are being cleansed. It helps, it really does! Grant and I just reached our four year anniversary of moving to Nashville! On our first year anniversary, to the day, Grant was fortunate to play guitar at the “Mother Church of Country Music,” the Ryman Auditorium. So, it was very fitting that this week he had another Nashville musical mile stone as he played The Station Inn which is known to many as the home of Bluegrass music.

And, by the way (here’s my big segue into the food portion of my post…), The Station Inn has yummy popcorn!

Last weekend, my sister and her family were visiting and we made homemade pizzas on the grill. Eric was the grill master and got one side crisp and then ran them into me where Ethan and I put the toppings on. Then they went back out for a few minutes to get the other side cooked and give the toppings a chance to melt in. Mmm, delicious flatbread pizzas…

From pizzas to sandwiches… I had a sandwich revelation this week: Humboldt Fog Cheese is an amazing component to a superb summer sandwich. Try one of these crazy concoctions, won’t you? On the left is crusty organic whole grain bread (big and hearty, the kind you’d find at some sort of Renaissance Festival) toasted, Humboldt Fog goat cheese, smoked turkey, avocado slices, pea shoots, and raw cultured red cabbage (crazy good- made by a company called Deep Root Organics). On the right, below, is the same bread, Humboldt Fog, and apple slices.

That brings me to today. Today, I kept thinking about Japanese noodles (as I so often do). I picked up some soba noodles and lots of yummy fresh veggies at the store on my way home. I searched for interesting soba noodle salad recipes online. One of my favorite new (to me) recipe blogs is 101 cookbooks. She has a couple Asian noodle dishes that sounded amazing. I found so many good ideas that I became overwhelmed and couldn’t even decide on what type of Asian dish I wanted- Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese… so I just started chopping and preparing a sauce from ingredients we had on hand. I decided to get some fresh herbs from our garden and incorporate those.

The sauce consisted of some Thai hot chilies, brown rice vinegar, tamari, a small amount of fish sauce, freshly grated ginger (keep ginger whole, in the freezer, and it lasts forever), and a tiny bit of brown sugar. I finely chopped bell peppers (the green ones are local from Delvin Farms- yay!), mushrooms, and broccoli.

Then I chopped a bunch of green onions in one pile and cilantro, garlic, and freshly squeezed lime juice in another pile. I sprinkled a little tamari on the sliced Springer Mountain Farms chicken and then began to saute the green onions in some grape seed oil (it holds the heat well). Once the onions were almost cooked, I added the chicken in and I sprinkled in a little tamari, white pepper, and sesame seeds. Once the chicken was flipped, I added in the cilantro and garlic.

When the chicken was done, I placed it on a plate and then threw the other veggies into the same pan. I gave those a quick saute and then added the chicken back in. Meanwhile, the soba noodles cooked in boiling water for 7 minutes. Once done, I drained them and ran cold water over them to stop them from cooking. I placed the noodles in a bowl and the chicken with veggies on top. I tore fresh herbs from the garden (cliantro, Genovese basil, Thai purple basil, mint, and cilantro) on top. I poured some of the sauce/dressing on top. I was pleasantly surprised how well all the flavors went together. It was spicy, tangy, and very fresh with all the different herbs right from the garden. Success!

More good eats and classic country music coming soon.

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June 3, 2010 · 11:45 pm

Comes A Time

Comes a time for me to appreciate Neil Young. You see, I have never been a big Neil Young fan. In fact, besides hearing friends play his music or whatever I came across on the radio, the most time I had ever spent with Neil Young was watching The Last Waltz countless times. Until tonight.

I knew Neil Young was talented and too many people whose musical taste I share hold him in such high regard. I knew I needed to get to know him better and that once I did, I would understand who he is but the time had never seemed right. I was a little intimidated maybe. His music doesn’t pull me in. It seems more like an acquired taste that takes time and I just hadn’t really wanted to put the time in yet. Until tonight.

Tonight, Neil Young played the Ryman Auditorium, one of my very favorite places in the whole wide world. I felt a little guilty getting to go without being a huge fan although, Grant is and has seen him six times and I knew if I was going to finally get to know Neil Young, the Ryman was the perfect place. Tickets were pricey. I joked all night about spending our summer vacation at the Ryman! But, I have to say that it was well worth every cent.

Neil was a one man band with 2 Martin guitars- one a small bodied with a mahogany top and one full bodied with a spruce top, a black Les Paul, one of my favorite guitars- a Gretsch White Falcon, a piano, a grand piano, his famous pump organ, and a harmonica. He spoke very little but still acknowledged us, his audience, with a quiet disposition. He reminded me of my Uncle Les who seemed on the surface to be a grumpy old cus but every once in awhile, he’d say something and I’d see a twinkle in his eye and get a genuine, warm feeling that he really liked me. Neil went from instrument to instrument and played what he wanted- some acoustic, some full on distortion and it all felt familiar, like we had all been there before. He seemed very comfortable. This was a perfect first meeting.

Unfortunately, no cameras were allowed, so I tried really hard to remember every moment. I had my tiny camera but could not disrespect the Ryman or Neil (oh, and there was also the fear of being kicked out as they threatened). The rainbow pictured above did appear in the sky just as we were walking to the Ryman.  I’ve also included various photos of The Mother Church of Country Music herself, past and present.

And luckily, I have many photos of our most recent adventures in Normandy, Tennessee. Our friends Nikki & Mike, brother and sister team extraordinaire, opened their new restaurant last weekend and we were fortunate to be a part of it. We drove down Sunday and spent the day- I helped take orders and Grant tended the smoker with Mike.

Normandy is a tiny town in Bedford County, about an hour outside of Nashville, that sits on the Duck River which is known for its pristine waters. The little main street, around the corner from George Dickel’s distillery, was previously abandoned until Nikki found this building and decided to make her dream become a reality. This is the beginning of something amazing, let me tell you! They decided to go ahead and open Saturdays and Sundays as they finish the remodeling and expand the menu and their ideas. For now, you can get some of the best smoked meats in Tennessee and delicious sides- they post a chalkboard menu out front.

June has just begun- many family and friend visits, yummy summer veggies, and tons of music (including this year’s first Red Barn Round-Up!!!) to come.

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