Category: Deliciousness

All things food related

Guilty Pleasures

For some reason I’ve been craving a lot of these lately:

I’m generally not a “sweets” eater.  I’d like to claim that is completely in an effort to be healthy.  But the truth is that I really just don’t have a sweet tooth. On the other hand, I’ve never met a plate of cheese fries I didn’t like.  So, don’t go handing me a medal of honor just yet.  Please don’t misunderstand me, though.  I rarely let myself indulge in something THAT sinful.  I’m just saying if I have to choose between a brownie (sweet) and fries (salty), I’m going for the fries every time.

But sometimes there is just nothing better than some warm cookies and an ice cold glass of milk. Since I only get a “cookies and milk” craving about twice a year, I generally roll with it when it comes.  A girl’s got to live a little, right?

My warm cookie of choice is the Nestle Ultimate with chocolate chunks and mini peanut butter cups.  (I’m a firm believer that the chocolate and peanut butter combo was sent to us directly from heaven.) Couple that with a glass of Horizon Organic Fat Free milk and I’m good for about 10 minutes of sheer bliss!

You wouldn’t know it from most of my posts lately, but I really do try to eat healthily most of the time.  But every now and then you need a little treat, right?  So now that you know my secret, what about you?  What’s your guilty pleasure?

Cheers, y’all!
Wine Girl

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Now THESE are Shrimp & Grits…

Y’all remember how I lamented the  Shrimp & Grits I had last week from Charlotte’s Bite Your Tongue, right?  I can’t help it, though.  You see, I’m spoiled…but let me back up.

I told y’all I went to Ole Miss, didn’t I?  Ole Miss is located in a town I love like no other – Oxford, Mississippi.  For a small Mississippi town, Oxford has a lot of culture and virtually nothing embodies local culture like food!  So it almost goes without saying that Oxford, the quintessential Southern town, is bursting with restaurants full of great Southern food.  During my tenure at Ole Miss and in the years I’ve returned to visit, I’ve seen many Oxford restaurants come and go, but there are a few that were there long before I got there and will probably still be there long after I’m gone.  One of these Oxford staples is City Grocery…and she makes some mean Shrimp & Grits!

Loving City Grocery’s Shrimp & Grits is actually how I learned to like grits period.  (Forgive me for I am about to speak, um write, Southern blasphemy!) I actually didn’t like grits until I got to college, fell in love with Shrimp & Grits, then decided I’d try them one day minus the shrimp.  Since I had never heard of or had Shrimp & Grits anywhere before City Grocery, I just assumed that this was a creation unique to this Oxford eatery.  It wasn’t until I moved to North Carolina that I discovered that Shrimp & Grits is actually cuisine straight from the South Carolina Low Country.

Nevertheless, I first came to love this dish at City Grocery and never eat it without thinking of my beloved Oxford.   So like any self-respecting Ole Miss girl, there will always be a soft spot in my heart (more like tummy) for City Grocery’s Shrimp & Grits.  It shouldn’t surprise me, then, that my Ole Miss friend and fellow blogger, Carmen from Keeping Up Klapper, left this comment on my Supper from N’Awlins post.

“It’s nearly impossible to find shrimp and grits as good as they make them at City Grocery in Oxford, right?! “

Little did she know…

I HAVE CITY GROCERY’S RECIPE FOR SHRIMP & GRITS!!!!  And here’s the proof:

The recipe is included in this cookbook put out by the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council.

As you can see from the cover, it is “A Collection of Recipes from Oxford, Mississippi.”  For my fellow Rebels, not only does it have the recipe for City Grocery’s Shrimp & Grits, it includes several recipes from Yocona River Inn, Downtown Grill, Ajax Diner, and Bottletree Bakery, just to name a few.  It’s also peppered with Grovin’ Tips, recipes for Grove food, Mississippi art, and essays from famous Mississippians.  If you went to Ole Miss, you need this cookbook!

To get one for yourself, just stop by the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council website and get one for yourself here.

But enough about books…let’s cook!

First you cook up some of these…

then mix in butter, sharp white Cheddar and Parmesan cheeses, cayenne pepper, paprika, and Tabasco sauce until they look like this:

Then you take  1 1/2 lbs of these…

and cook them up in some olive oil with some bacon, mushrooms, garlic, lemon juice, and white wine like so:

I should tell you (as if you haven’t inferred it already) this is not a low-calorie dish.  Anything that has this much bacon in it should be eaten sparingly.

But when you do eat it…man, oh man, is it good!  (Side note- The recipe says to cook all that bacon in with the shrimp and mushrooms, but I find that makes the bacon get a little wilty again after it’s already been cooked.  So I reserve a couple crispy tablespoons to spinkle on the top of the finished product.)

I should also warn you that it’s got a kick!  I actually only put in half the Tabasco sauce the recipe calls for when I make it and I still need plenty of this to wash it down

along with plenty of water, of course. 🙂

Now THESE are Shrimp & Grits!

Cheers, y’all!
Wine Girl

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Paella’s Key Ingredient

Consider this post to be an addendum to my initial Spanish Cooking Saturday’s post on paella.  When I made it at home for me and the Beer Guy, I did it for two reasons: 1) I’d been wanting to make it for over a year and I finally had the pan to do it, and 2) I needed a trial run before I made it for my family while we were at the beach.

Since we were on the coast and I had access to more beautiful, fresh, local seafood,  I decided to add a few ingredients that I didn’t have in my first batch.  In doing so, I realized there is one ingredient that you should never make paella without.

Was it these beautiful scallops…

or these meaty little mussels…

or the smoked sausage (the shrimp, lobster, and peas were in my first batch)….

or the moonlight under which it was cooked?

Nope.  While all this ingredients definitely added more depth and ambience to my seafood paella, none of them are essential as paella can be made with any kind of meat/game, chicken, duck, or seafood.

The key ingredient to paella is COMMUNITY!  I mentioned in my inaugural paella post that real Spaniards eat the paella right out of the pan.  While BG and I had a blast doing that very thing the first time around, my pan holds 8-10 servings.  So the first night we had it, we got to eat it out of the pan  but the subsequent nights we had to dish it out in to bowls and reheat it.  That, of course, dried it out a little.

But to sit it in the middle of a table, encircled by my family, was priceless!  We had a little pan con tomate on the side too.  (I was too busy eating to get a pic of that.)  The fact that we were doing this seaside, poolside, and under the stars wasn’t too shabby either!

We neatly avoided the whole reheating-and-drying-out issue by eating it until there was nothing but empty lobster and mussel shells in the pan.  🙂

This is how this dish was meant to be served – IN COMMUNITY.  Lesson learned – Never make paella without loved ones around you!

Cheers, y’all!
Wine Girl

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I Heart Oatmeal…Now

My usual breakfast is a lovely little combo of Fage 0% Greek Yogurt (“yogret” as my niece would say), topped with 1/2 a cup of strawberries, and a tablespoon of sliced almonds with 2 slices of Canadian bacon on the side.  The Greek yogurt tends to have more protein than regular yogurt, so with that plus the Canadian bacon and sliced almonds I usually get enough protein to tide me over until lunch.  The strawberries are for sheer yummy deliciousness and to get in one of the recommended 5 daily servings of fruit and veggies.  I really enjoy this breakfast it would generally keep me satiated from ~7am to noon.  That is, until recently…

In addition to my usual daily workouts I’m now training for a Susan G. Komen 3-day walk.  That means that for about 3/5 weekdays I’m walking an extra 3-5 miles and on the weekends I’m now walking 6-8 miles.  The weekend distance will continue to grow as I get closer to my 3-Day walk in October, during which time I will walk 60 miles in 3 days.  So I guess I’m burning a lot more calories because, lately, the lovely yogurt and berries combo is just not cutting the mustard.  By 10am I am STARVING!  My stomach is NOTICEABLY  growling during my therapy sessions, and I have to remind myself that it would neither be professional, nor sanitary to sneak bites of the things I’m feeding to my dysphagia (swallowing) patients.

So, I am searching for a yummy, healthy, breakfast that’s gonna have a little more “stick-to-it-ness” (yes, I made that up) than my typical breakfast.  You’ve noticed in my blog roll and by a couple of my posts that I am a fan of Kath Eats Real Food.  It’s a blog that began as a twenty-something girl’s weight loss journey and through her journey decided that she wanted to go back to school to become a Registered Dietician.  It’s all about healthy living.  Kath, the author, is a HUGE fan of oatmeal and makes more variations of it that I would have ever thought possible.

I have never eaten oatmeal.  It looks like a gray, lumpy, pile of mush.  I will admit, though, that smelling someone cooking up a cinnamony bowl of it would pique my curiosity but then I’d take a look at it and think “Nope.  Just can’t do it.”  But since I’m trying new things and oatmeal is generally regarded as a heart-healthy, relatively low calorie, protein-rich breakfast…and I am on the lookout for such a breakfast…I thought, “Why not.  Let’s give it a shot.”  If I’m going to do this, it’s got to be yummy.  So I went to the Oatmeal Master…Kath.  She has a video on how to make her Kath Classic Oatmeal on her site followed by recipes for numerous variations.

And, what do ya know… I liked it!  So much so that I looked down at my bowl and realized that, while perusing my favorite blogs over breakfast (second breakfast, actually since I was starving after walking 8 mi this a.m.), I had inadvertently eaten my Kath Classic Oatmeal into the shape of a heart.

(Side note – Kath’s video recipe leaves out salt, but both her written recipe on the site and the instructions on the back of the Quaker Old Fashioned Oats container call for a little salt.  The salt is needed and I’m definitely going to add it next time.)

The moral of this story – Trying new things won’t kill ya, and you might even like what you try!  Needless to say, I’m looking forward to many more oatmeal adventures!

Cheers!
Wine Girl

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Beach Brunch for the Fam

So I mentioned that my best breakfast ever was the one the Beer Guy and I had our first morning at The Farmhouse Inn during our Wine Country 10th Anniversary Trip last year.  It was this Oat Griddle Cakes topped with strawberries, homemade whipped cream, candied walnuts, maple syrup, and the best bacon I’ve ever had.

Well, maple syrup was available, but the griddle cakes were so yummy and flavorful with all the other toppings that I just never got around to adding the syrup.

About 3 weeks after our return the Beer Guy’s brother and his wife made the trek from Memphis to Charlotte for a visit with us.  I decided to try and recreate it for our guests.  Through diligent internet searching I found this Rachel Ray recipe for Oatmeal Cookie Pancakes.  You’ll notice that the recipe calls for raisins, which makes perfect sense if you are aiming for pancakes that taste like oatmeal cookies.  I like raisins, but since my original breakfast did not have raisins and I was aiming for a recreation, I just didn’t add those into the batter.

Now, please do not fool yourselves into thinking that I attempted homemade whipped cream to top this deliciousness like The Farmhouse.  I am secure enough to admit that I did not and Cool Whip worked just fine.  I did, however, sort of whip up my own recipe for candied walnuts.  I didn’t really measure things out. Basically, I melted a couple tablespoons of butter, stirred in about a tablespoon of brown sugar, added cinnamon until it looked right, poured that over about a cup of walnuts, stirred to coat, spread them out in a single layer on a baking sheet, then popped them in the toaster oven for a couple minutes.

Not half bad for a makeshift candied walnuts on the fly.

Breakfast was so well received by our guests, that I decided to make it for my own family last year while on our annual beach vacation.  We were there over Father’s Day and I thought it would be a nice way to treat the dad’s in our family.  So I garnered a little help for my, then 3 yo, niece…

and whipped it up again.  (Please excuse the “bed head” on each of us.)

Once again, it got rave reviews.  So, I’m not sure, then, why I was surprised that when planning for this year’s trip my sister posted this comment on my Facebook wall – “I know you are planning to make those banana waffle things again this year.”  (In case you haven’t checked out the recipe, there are mashed bananas in the batter.)

Um, well.  I hadn’t planned on it, but I guess I am now… So I gathered the ingredients, packed my handy dandy Cuisinart Griddler (love this thing, but that’s another post), and whipped it up yet again.  This time I enlisted the BG’s services as the official griddle cake flipper.

Have griddle, will travel.

Not a bad recreation, huh?

Cheers!

Wine Girl

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Spanish Cooking Saturdays – Paella

Today, I introduce what I intend to be a regular spot on this blog – Spanish Cooking Saturdays.  I do not promise that it will be a weekly spot, but it will be at least a monthly spot, possibly a little more frequently than that. I’ve got a big cookbook full of Spanish recipes, courtesy of Mario Batali, which will serve as fodder for many future blog entries.

Since I have this handy dandy new paella pan, I shall start this adventure by trying my hand at paella.  Apparently, before actually using the paella pan, it must be properly seasoned.  I don’t remember all the rationale as to why this needs to be done, but I think it’s got something to do with keeping the pan from rusting.  Anyway, seasoning the pan involves wiping it down with canola oil and placing it on my stove burners until it changes from the pretty, shiny, silvery steel color to a golden brown throughout the surface of the pan, like so:

Being generally persnickety and liking for things to always be clean and new looking, this sort of distresses me.  However, I choose to look at the seasoning of my pan as evidence that it is being put to good use, not just getting “messed up.”

And speaking of good use…

Now, Mario and Gwyneth made this on a open fire in Valencia with a well “seasoned” chef.  Not having access to a space for an open fire in the heart of Charlotte, I asked the Beer Guy to fire up the grill for me.  I’m not exactly sure how to go about doing that myself.  We made a”rule” when we got married – I’m in charge of indoor cooking, he’s in charge of outdoor cooking…and he who does not cook it is in charge of cleaning it up! (That’s works out pretty well for moi as most of our meals are made indoors. 🙂 )

Making paella isn’t difficult, it just has several steps.  The whole process took about 1 1/2 hrs, but it was well worth it in the end.  I chose to make a seafood paella since I will likely be making this for my family at the beach next week.  I grabbed some lobster tails, shrimp, tiger prawns and the like from the seafood department at my local Harris Teeter.  First you throw those in the pan to brown them and establish the seafood flavored base for the dish.

Looks good enough to eat by itself, right?  But we must press on…Remove the shellfish, add the onions, and cook until soft.

Next add pureed tomato, sweet Spanish pimentón, and saffron.

Add the Bomba rice and the stock.  If I was super cool I would have made my own stock.  But when there’s no time for that, store bought stock works just fine.

Cook until the rice has absorbed nearly all the liquid

Add the shellfish, any other uncooked seafood, and some peas into the mix and cook until the remainder of the liquid is absorbed and the rice is all brown and crunchy around the edges of the pan.  Mario says to cook it until the pan starts to make a funny “crackling noise” and you are starting to worry that it’s burning.

Voila-The finished product!

(And yes, I’m aware that I used a French term to punctuate the completion of my Spanish dish, but I am unaware of the Spanish equivalent.)  Since the paella needed to “rest” for 10 min or so before serving, there was ample time to snap some “finished product” shots.

Next up, crack open a great Spanish wine

eat it right out of the pan (‘cuz that’s what real Spaniards do)…

and enjoy your Saturday evening!

I can think of no better way to eat in on a Saturday night, can you?

Cheers!

Wine Girl

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Belated Dinner & A Bruschetta Faux Pas

We have had a very SOCIAL weekend this Memorial Day Weekend! Friday night we finally got around to doing dinner with our friends Suz and Matthew. They had their first baby in January. I intended to take them dinner when they were recently home from the hospital with a brand new baby…exhausted…not knowing which end was up. However, it had been so long since we had gotten to hang out, that Suz wanted us to stay and eat with them. I explained to her that this was supposed to be a gesture, not us inviting ourselves over for dinner. But she persisted. So we set a date and, wouldn’t you know it, it iced and snowed in the Queen City for that entire weekend. Our dinner date was cancelled as we couldn’t get out of our driveway. That was mid-January. We JUST got this thing rescheduled for last Friday! Seriously…are we THAT busy? That’s pathetic.

Oh, well. Better late than never, I guess. Suz supplied the vino, the salad, and the grill. We brought the salmon, our new cedar planks, and this awesome Goat Cheese Bruschetta for an appetizer.

For the main course we prepared this Cedar Plank Grilled Salmon and my special green bean recipe.

It was all a big hit! The bruschetta was so yummy delicious that I took it to two other events on Sunday: First to “drinks and hors d’oevres” with our friends Heather and Chris in their gorgeous new backyard and then to a cookout at our friend Aimee’s house. I should have coordinated with Heather, because she had prepared three other types of bruschetta for our get together.  For “foodies” like us that’s sort of like showing up to the Oscars in the same dress.

Judging by the empty serving trays at the end of our two hour visit, no one seemed to mind the bruschetta faux pas!

Today is Memorial Day and it’s gray and rainy here in CLT. So, the Beer Guy and I have decided to stay at home and made good use of the leftover veggies from the weekend while polishing off the remains of a Pork Tenderloin with Shallots.

Mmmm!

Cheers!
Wine Girl

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