cooking | eric & jennilee

Archive - cooking RSS Feed

fall weather eats

September 19, 2011 by eric in cooking, married life with 1 Comment

I just had to post this from Jennilee’s fb (plus it’s actually been a while that the blog got some love). Since Jennilee is from upstate NY, September usually signals for her the start of cooler weather, apple cider donuts, and apple picking! Of course, we don’t really have much of that down here in Houston. Right now it’s still sunny and in the 90′s and seems like it will be that way for the next month or so.

Well Jennilee was feeling a little home sick, so she decided to add some New England flare to our Sunday night dinner. She originally just wanted to create a single dish, but wound up cooking up a storm. So last night’s dinner menu was Jennilee’s ode to Fall: butternut squash mash, apple stuffing, braised apple cider cabbage, and stuffed pork.

…and some prosecco to top it off

piave, where art thou?

July 23, 2011 by jennilee in cooking, married life with 0 Comments

There is one favorite cheese of ours and its name is Piave. It is a hard cow’s milk cheese with fat crystals that have a little crunch while you eat them. It pairs very well with a tannic red but most importantly, it goes so well with truffle honey!

Since arriving in H-town we keep seeking it out, from Whole Foods to HEB unfortunately we have not found any. Today we confirmed that H-town-ians actually are not huge fans of this type of cheese hence why no one really stocks it. If and when they do they actually throw out a lot of it due to lack of demand. UGH!

We did find a suitable like-cheese today though at Whole Foods thanks to our cheese monger. It is called Bianco Sardo and is made with sheep’s milk. We bought some truffle honey (and unlike the DiBruno’s version we were buying this included actual chunks of black truffle), opened up a Cupcake Red Velvet ’09 and poof! A match was made!

Any other recommendations for nice strong cheeses, preferably with fat crystals would be greatly appreciated!

in search for a few good farmer(‘s markets that is!)

July 9, 2011 by jennilee in cooking, married life with 2 Comments

You know what I have found to be the funniest (as in odd, not ha ha) sometimes most frustrating things? I have found myself liking all those things my mom always told me I would like while growing-up but never wanted to like just because my mom told me I would like them. Yes, this does sound childish but you cannot honestly say you never had these moments either!

One of those things are farmers markets. When I was in high school/college my mom would always talk about farmers markets and how it was a great way to give back to the local guys and eat fresher foods. Not that I did not want to eat fresher foods but one thing about my mom is that she is a child of the Woodstock days and hence was always more about Mother Earth, etc (which is NOT a bad thing but who wants to admit their mom, hippie or not, is in fact, hip? ). Well a few years ago Eric and I started getting into them. Our favorite one turned out to be just a few blocks away from our apartment in Philly. It was not even a block long and could only line one side of the sidewalk but it was our Saturday morning thing. It was also where I could get my fix of fresh apple cider donuts year round (I’m an Upstate NY girl, this is one of my childhood faves!)!

So when we moved to H-town we knew we needed to find a farmers market, but where to go? Turned out there are a bunch so we decided to check one out on a Sunday morning. It was located in a parking lot with about five tables and only one of them had vegetables on it. Out of five tomatoes I gave it a 1. The next weekend we tried another one, the Bayou City Farmers Market hosted by Urban Harvest this was by far the biggest farmers market we have ever gone to, literally 3xs bigger than our humble favorite out of Philly! Hosted in a parking lot on Saturday mornings off of Richmond Ave there are two rows of tables, the first row solely filled with farmers tables, cheese monger tables, delicious pastries, fresh eggs and flowers and the second row has a mix of the first PLUS you can get made-to-order food made with local ingredients. The best part though? LIVE MUSIC! Such a cool experience!

Our first trip cost us $34 and it bought us all of this:

note: there were two pastries purchased however one had to be QC’d before we took this picture back at home..

Highlights included squash blossoms for $3…and we got more than 6 in a box! I remember finding squash blossoms in Philly and paid $1/blossom! We also bought chicken samosas, the tiniest garlic cloves I have ever seen (PS do not buy garlic at the farmers market, I know, kind of a contradiction but I paid $2 for 7 cloves and then saw the regular sized cloves at HEB for 2/$1, I want to support local farmers but I also cannot kill my wallet in doing it!), and we also bought an assortment of squash including this round flower shaped one that we wound-up slicing like a tomato, drizzling EVOO/salt/pepper and grilled them and it was delicious!

We are now regulars at the Bayou City Farmers Market

our H-town haul from the Bayou Farmer's Market

first CSA delivery

May 14, 2011 by jennilee in cooking with 0 Comments

Our first CSA box came in last week and we were really excited about what we received!

Inside our box we found a new green called mizuna both in cooking and baby form, 2 huge bunches of baby bok choy (their version of “baby” makes me think I have been buying minuscule bok choy from the grocery stores this whole time), 1 bunch rhubarb, a bunch of scallions and a package of whole white mushrooms. Click here to see all the contents!

baby mizuna with a lemon-shallot dressing

May 10, 2011 by eric in cooking with 1 Comment

Getting baby mizuna in our first box of CSA veggies was pretty exciting, since we’ve never had it before. Mizuna has this great crisp texture and a subtle flavor almost like a cross between mustard plant and a tame arugula. Definitely makes for an awesome summer salad.

So here’s the recipe for the salad. The salad was a simple mix of baby mizuna and grape tomatoes, sprinkled with feta. If you’re into it, try substituting anchovies for the feta. It’s the perfect saltiness to compliment the mizuna’s flavor.