liamsaunt

I think term “cracked” refers to the fact that the conch is sliced and pounded to make it somewhat tender, then deep fried. At least, that’s my understanding! This version was topped with stewed onions. It was just OK to be honest. The tartar sauce was too sweet and the conch was a bit greasy. The shrimp was the best dish. Breakfast was a slice of the coconut bread I picked up yesterday, with yogurt, fruit, and iced coffee Then it was beach walking time for me. When we got hungry, we decided to drive over to Tropic Breeze, another casual place pretty close to the house The view from our table It was very windy today and some sargassum came up on their beach The menu was very small, and I forgot to take a picture of it. We just ordered what the server recommended anyway. Margarita for husband Fried lobster chunks. I actually ate some of this and enjoyed it. I guess I don’t dislike lobster anymore haha Husband’s surf and turf burger, topped with lobster, served with garlic fries and fried grouper with plantains and rice for me. The portion was huge and it was really good, so I brought half of this home to possibly eat tomorrow We got home in time to get in two laps up and down “our” beach under the stars before it got too dark. I think I need to find something not fried for dinner tomorrow 😀

Breakfast at the house. Not too exciting. Those are vegan “eggs” I brought from home. Basically they are mung beans soaked and pulverized with spices and stuff. I like regular eggs too but these are pretty tasty for what they are. A yellow crowned night heron was hanging out on the beach in front of the house all day Went walking on three different beaches today, all beautiful, all deserted We drove down the road for an early dinner at Santanna’s Bar and Grill Very casual The menu Shrimp app Cracked conch Grouper Husband’s margarita I also went to Mommy’s Bakery next door to see what was on offer, and picked up a loaf of coconut bread for breakfast. We got back to the house in time for a beach walk before sunset

Today was pretty lazy. We went into town (about a 40 minute drive each way) to buy some fruit and pick up a couple of bottles of wine for my husband. The lady at the wine shop randomly announced she was giving him a 50% discount. Not sure why, but he’ ll take it. The prices for wine are about the same as at home. The grocery prices are not that much more than home too, maybe $1-2 more per item, which isn’t too bad. There is a 10% VAT on top of all purchases. The rest of my afternoon was spent alternating between sitting on the house deck and walking on the beach. (I dipped my foot in the pool, but am not sure if I am going to end up swimming in it. I am a wimp when it comes to water temps) We went to dinner at Blu on the Water, one of the closest restaurants to our house. Probably a 15 minute drive. We were seated in a screened porch area, so the photos of the view did not come out, but it’s on a cliff above the water, and very lovely. Here’s the menu Husband had a margarita, and I had club soda with lime We shared the seafood fritters to start. There was not a ton of seafood in them, but the batter had a nice flavor, and I did get one big chunk of conch. Husband had the seafood risotto, which he enjoyed very much. It had lobster, grouper, and shrimp. And I had the grilled grouper. They brought out some of their jerk sauce on the side for me to try And then we shared a slice of key lime pie for dessert

No, there were four or five, just piled on top of each other in that little dish. It was enough food for me.

For the next week I am staying on Little Exuma in the Bahamas. We decided to come down without knowing much about the island, or making any advance plans. It seemed like the kind of place where you can do that. View from the air The airport is small. This is the terminal. We are staying on Little Exuma. There’s not much here, which is how we like it. We got to the house just before sunset. This is part of the outdoor area Here’s the kitchen The giant snack bowl and bottle of rum was left for us by the house management. All the grocery stores close early, and there are no places nearby to get dinner. I did research enough to know that, so brought down a small cooler with some food for our first night and made dinner from that. This morning was a beautiful sunny day This is the beach our house is on. All beaches in the Bahamas are public, but you cannot access them over private land. I think there’s a public path over that rock outcropping you can see at the end of the beach. And this is the beach next to the one that we are staying on. There’s a public path between the two We headed out in search of a late lunch and drove down a rough and steep road to end up at Haulover Bay restaurant and bar. The menu was just a chalk sign, offering fried or grilled snapper, grilled shrimp, grilled chicken, or a grilled steak, all with pigeon peas and rice and either vegetables or corn. Cash only. We chose the snapper and the shrimp and went outside to find a place to sit I had a lemongrass iced tea, and husband had a mint drink Shrimp Snapper Everything was really tasty, and the setting was fantastic, with a wonderful breeze.

Rigatoni with roasted red pepper sauce

Penne with carrot sauce. I sauteed yellow and orange carrots, onion, and garlic, then cooked them in a quart of corn stock I had in the freezer, then pureed it in the Vitamix with some butter and salt. I added some chopped raw arugula at the end. Four out of five diners enjoyed it, and one grumbled that there was no point in eating carrot sauce when you can just have tomato sauce. Oh well, I have decided that I cannot please everyone. I just try and rotate who is going to be annoyed 😂

Chicken, bell pepper, and oyster mushroom stir fry

Coconut lime chicken with roasted broccolini and curried rice with carrots and raisins

Chiming in from the younger side (early 50s), so growing up when these recipes were supposedly marketed, I can say that my Mom never made food like that. She was on a limited budget, and I honestly think it would have been more expensive for her to cook all those canned foods glopped together than what we did eat. She had a Betty Crocker cookbook (I think all the moms did), and we had a huge vegetable garden in the backyard. The families in the neighborhood had co-ops for certain foods—for example, one person would drive in to a pick up site and get this massive 50 lb block of sharp cheddar cheese, and then it would be divvied up among all the families. I think there was something similar for meat, but I disliked meat even as a kid, so don’t remember the details. I do know there was a freezer in our garage and a truck would come and stock it with meat cuts and maybe other stuff…American Frozen Foods or something like that. I never ate any of it. The one canned food I do remember always being in the house was Campbells soup, generally the chicken noodle and the vegetable ones. They were served for lunch, not dinner. The only casseroles I remember my mom making were a chicken and rice thing (tolerable), Mac and cheese (hated it), and a tomato, summer squash, and ground beef thing (hated it). Dinner was more typically a small piece of fish or steak (and when I say small, I mean one steak for five people), lots of vegetables from the garden, and rice. Other times we had pasta with homemade sauce, or my dad would make hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill.

It is a mix. Some stuff is storage vegetables, like parnsips, radishes, potatoes, carrots, beets and cabbage. Other stuff is grown in the winter in greenhouses and high tunnels. Generally we get kale, micro greens, pea shoots, and arugula from those. And then they have a mushroom cave, where they grow mushrooms year round, and we get a box of those every week. At this time of year, they also include a loaf of bread and one pantry item, like jam, honey, or a jar of spices. This week we got locally made tortillas as the pantry item. I should clarify, that was 40 individual carrots, not 40 pounds of carrots! Your post did get me curious though, so I weighed everything. I currently have just under 10 lbs. of carrots, 8 lbs. of radishes, 4 lbs. of beets, and 4 lbs. of parsnips in my crisper drawers. Luckily my house has two full kitchens with lots of refrigeration storage so it is not a problem for me, and root vegetables keep forever. Generally when the roots start really piling up, I will roast a chicken on a huge bed of them, and then use the leftovers to make a soup for dinner, with leftover soup individually portioned and going into the "soup library" in our garage freezer. If someone in the house does not like what's on the menu for dinner, they can pull a soup from the soup library to have instead. There's always at least six flavors to choose from.

Trying to get ahead of the carrot glut in my kitchen, last night I made carrot gnocchi with roasted mushrooms and broccoli, toasted pine nuts and brown butter. The gnocchi took care of a couple pounds of carrots but I still have around 40 left. CSA delivery is today, and their email said we are getting either carrots or potatoes as our random vegetable in the box this week. I hope I get a box with potatoes in it!

Soup again. This one was roasted sweet potatoes, onions and garlic, harissa, lime, cilantro and coconut milk, with more cilantro on top and some smashed everything but the bagel cashews that I got in a gift basket.

Loaded mashed potato soup made with the remaining mashed potatoes from the sole meunière dinner. I also used the outside parts of a giant carrot from my CSA box that was half the side of my head. The inside was too woody to cook with, but the edges were fine. And a loaf of speedy no-knead bread to go with the soup

Rigatoni with green and black olives in a sauce made from some grape tomatoes that I had forgotten about and found dried up on my counter.

Thanks for this report! It sounds like an exciting trip. I am glad you made it through without getting sick too!

Friday: everything but the bagel coated tuna with rice and a smacked cucumber and pepper salad Saturday: broiled sole with lemon and capers with mashed potatoes and spinach

Would you be willing to name the cookbook? Last night, nephew wanted to cook a beef massaman curry from a YouTube cook he watches. Sister and I do not eat beef, so I made us a cauliflower massaman style curry to have instead. I added some kale to the cauliflower because my CSA saw fit to give me 4 leaves of kale in yesterday's delivery. Not enough for a group dinner, but enough for this meal. They also gave me 37 carrots. You never know what you are going to find in the CSA box! Nephew also made a lemongrass and curry leaf rice, which was delicious, and a flatbread that was a good idea but turned out a bit tough and chewy. We all appreciated his effort. Beef curry Cauliflower and kale curry

A couple of recents. Chicken katzu Spinach risotto with pistachios

I do not use any oil on the griddle. I cook the bread in a dry cast iron skillet, and then run butter over it when it comes off. In this case, I used some canned Urbani truffle cream sauce that my sister gave me in my Christmas stocking. I think she bought it at Eataly. The mushrooms on top are just roasted blue oyster mushrooms with truffle salt on them. Last night, we had coconut fish curry with cod (and broccoli that I added to veg it up a bit), and rice with dill. lemon, and butter. Both the curry and rice recipes are from Meera Sodha's Made in India cookbook.

This week's dinners. Sunday we had truffled mac and cheese and roasted broccolini Monday was spaghetti and meatballs Tuesday we had miso noodle bowls with jammy eggs Wednesday was freezing so we had soup again, this time a lemony greek potato, spinach, and dill one with feta cheese Last night nephew braved the frigid temps and grilled some peri peri chicken. He also made the tomato rice. I contributed the flatbread and chopped salad

I've been bad about taking pictures lately, but one of last night's pizzas was a new flavor, so I snapped a picture with my phone: chicken parmesan pizza. Nephew loved it. The other pizzas were flavors I have already posted here endless times.

We spent most of this week using the leftovers from Christmas dinner in other meals. The main course at Christmas for the meat eaters was a rib roast. Leftovers from that showed up in a sandwich with truffle butter, arugula and parmesan Non beef eaters had a fluffy egg sandwich with chipotle aioli instead Another night we had miso salmon ramen bowls with napa cabbage and assorted mushrooms in a light veggie miso broth. Nephew hates salmon so he had more of the leftover beef, thinly sliced, in his instead, with a broth I made using the leftover beef jus plus ginger, garlic, and szechuan peppercorns. He said it was good. I did not taste it of course. Another night I baked a loaf of crusty bread And served it with a soup I made to use up all the leftover twice baked potatoes and spinach. Everyone commented on how tasty it was. Too bad I will never be able to make it again haha!

One hour to go on the flight and the WiFi is actually working so…honestly the traffic in Paris is really bad, but the traffic where we live is just as bad, if not worse. It does not matter how far you are going, it always seems to take a minimum of an hour to get there. This is true in the city itself or in the surrounding towns. When I was still working, my job was in Boston right by Fenway Park and I actually stopped transferring to the subway from the commuter rail to get to my office because the subway was so slow I could just walk there in the same amount of time. And the commuter rail took just as long and cost almost as much as driving in would have, but at least you could read the paper or a book while you rode in on the train, assuming the WiFi worked and you could get a seat (both debatable). One interesting thing about cars in Paris is that the mayor recently closed many of the inner roads to cars. Only taxis and busses can use them now. She wants more people to bike and walk. It was really pleasant for us pedestrians!

Well we certainly got our steps in yesterday. We walked all over St. Germaine and then all the way up to the Arc du Triomphe. Shopping on the Champs d Elysees was not for me. It’s mostly chain stores and mostly featuring three things I do not not like: perfume, fashion, and jewelry. I did go briefly into the Galleries de Lafayette because they had a Wicked exhibit and I wanted to take pictures for my niece. The perfume smell quickly drove us back out This is one of the costumes Ariana Grande wore. I cannot tell you how excited I was to find out by walking up to it that she is shorter than me. Everyone is taller than me! OK, I only have half an inch on her but it’s something 😂 I took this photo of a Ferrari you can rent for my nephew. No I will not be allowing him to rent it when we come in April, but he can dream haha Neither of us wanted a full dinner so we just went to a cafe. I had a slice of spinach quiche And husband had a slice of pate en croute We somehow found room for dessert and split a coffee sundae. And that’s it for this visit. We are on the plane waiting to fly home, so I best wrap this up. Thanks for following along, and if anyone has tips for my April trip, I am all ears!