liamsaunt

Yum, wahoo! This is my favorite fish. Of course, I can only get it when on vacation. My favorite thing to do with it is just to marinate for an hour or so in olive oil, then grill it and serve with a compound butter. I've poached it before too, but I like it best grilled. I never thought to brine it before. I'll try that next trip.

When we do a big antipasti, we have (in addition to the things already mentioned) A couple of different fritatta, cut into small wedges Roasted onions Arancini Crostini with various toppings Marinated mozzarella Shrimp poached with garlic, lemon, and olive oil Marinated artichokes Eggplant rounds, breaded and topped with mozzarella and tomato slices Sometimes white anchovies And we line all the serving plates with arugula, so people can get their salad fix. Hope this helps.

Last night we had butternut squash lasagna and a spinach salad. Very comforting and good.

Assorted serving platters and a big soup tureen. I am short and need a stepladder to get things down from on top of the fridge. There are cabinets up there too but I keep them empty because I cannot reach them without getting on the top of the stepladder and really reaching..

On my kitchen (or, as I like to call it, closet) counters: just a microwave (aka fancy butter melter) and a toaster oven. My food processor is in a cabinet above my work space. My coffee pot, coffee grinder, knife sharpener, blender and stick blender live on the shelf behind the door to the basement. Those are my only appliances--I am appliance deprived!

Last night: Rack of lamb with mushroom risotto and broccoli:

Last night's dinner, from the you can never have too much butter club: Butternut squash ravioli with a sage-brown butter sauce, with pine nuts and fried shallots.

Last night we had chicken parts whacked thin and stuffed with broccoli and cheddar, rolled and crumbed. With the roasted cauliflower from recipe gullet, some seared spinach, and mashed potatoes.

My family always wants the same things at Thanksgiving, no substitutions, so the stuffing is bread cubes, tossed with a mix celery, sage, thyme, and onion sauteed in lots of butter, seasoned with salt and pepper, and then moistened with a bit of stock. There is always lots of stuffing, so some goes in the bird and some in a seperate casserole dish. Some years I make a second stuffing for variety, but most people won't try it on principle. No changes on Thanksgiving, don't you know. One year I made a cornbread-sausage-cranberry-pecan stuffing that my Dad really liked. I think if I made an oyster stuffing I would have a full-out mutiny on my hands.

Saturday dinner: linguini with clam sauce: There is lots of extra sauce because my mom was there--she loves clam sauce but hates pasta, so I make lots of sauce for her to eat with bread. Sunday, baked haddock with roesti potatoes and asparagus. Monday, pre-Monday night football: spaghetti and meatballs. No pictures for that, hungry football obsessed men ate it all too quickly! And, despite my carb loading for the dudes, they skipped going to the game and are instead lolling in front of the TV. Losers! (granted they only had standing rooms seats, but still... )

The picture is too dark but it tasted good: chicken stew with puff pastry crust.

I love fritters! My two favorites are salt cod and corn fritters topped with maple syrup.

Great minds, Jason. Great minds. ← I feel so much better. I had thought Campbell's tomato was MY dirty little secret. ← Campbell's tomato soup kept me alive in college. My senior year I had no money and used to eat half a can almost every day for dinner with one slice of day old bread. I don't eat it any more, but I still have a fond spot in my heart for it. I almost never eat canned soup these days, but if it's lunch in a pinch, I fnd that most flavors are enhanced by lots and lots of pepper, and a knob of butter.

A roast turkey sandwich, made from the leftovers of yesterday's pre-Thanksgiving meal.

No pictures, my camera batteries died. Early Thanksgiving dinner with the family for my BIL, home on last leave before deployment: Brined herbed roast turkey, bread stuffing, mashed potatoes, spinach, butternut squash, cranberry sauce (yes homemade!), green beans, lots of gravy (two kinds: with or without giblets), and pinot noir (belle glos 2003, it was good). Mommom's apple pie.

OK, I have another one. This is arancini. Oozy, greasy, arancini. Only 600 calories per piece!

That skate looks delicious. The orrecchiette also. Now I am hungry...

My grandmother's dining room table had a drawer in it at my uncle's spot. He hated vegetables, so used to slide the drawer open and drop the veggies in when my granmother wasn't looking. He'd come back after she went to bed to dig them out and bury them in the trash, readying the scene for the next day. When I was four, my older sister snuck out of bed during our nap time and said she was going to bring me back a treat. She came back with a sundae dish piled high with fudge sauce and whipped cream. I took a big bite of the sundae, only to find that there was no ice cream--she had filled the dish with broken spaghetti. Mean sister.

I wear one of my old husband's t-shirts when cooking. If I wear something nice, it is inevitable that I will spill oil or red wine on it. I wear an apron when I am making something particularly messy. I always wear short sleeves because regular shirts are too long for my arms and the sleeves always unroll and get covered with food. I never wear anything with strings on it after catching a sweatshirt I was wearing on fire after the string dropped into the stove flame. On Sundays, when I cook with my mother and sister, we all wear iron chef t-shirts, because we think it's funny.

Yum, applesauce. We just made 20 quarts of it last weekend. I store mine in a stand alone freezer to keep it from discoloring. It does not seem to affect the taste or texture.

It was cold and rainy last night, so we had Marcella Hazan's chicken with two lemons, mashed potatoes, roasted beets, and broccoli. I made some gravy also, and we had a nice bottle of pinot noir.

A piece of toasted spinach-feta bread, a few almonds, and an apple. Giant glass of water.

The family all came over yesterday for all sports, all the time, so dinner was a buffet of antipasto items that could be easily eaten in front of the big TV: three kinds of fritatta (red onion, sundried tomato, and sausage) arugula salad with walnuts, parmesean, and lemon Roasted onion, red peppers, and basil salad cheese plate assorted meats and sausages plate crostini with two toppings (eggplant-tomato and fresh mozzarella, basil, tomato) lots of different kinds of olives, plus an olive spread for crackers arancini and of course, lots of wine! It was all really good, and tasted even better once we realized the Red Sox were going to win. The Pats, however...

I have a heavy cleaver too, but I really don't use it much. Hacking up chickens, yes. Sometimes attempting to hack frozen pieces of meat apart (not recommended). Hacking bones into smaller pieces for stock...that's about it. I will confess, however, that I am a little scared of my cleaver. I am very accident prone, and every time I use it I have visions of hacking one of my fingers off. Or dropping it on my foot blade down resulting in loss of toe.

leftovers from last night's dinner: rigatoni in a tomato-basil sauce from the garden (the last of my fresh basil and tomatoes), with garlic chicken sausage and parmesean.