Friday tidbits

Grilled pastrami (with gruyere, griddled onions and garlic aioli) and a side dish of mac and cheese. One of the yummiest meals I've had in the last few weeks, at the North Branch Pizza & Burger. We always give restaurants that are new to us two chances before deciding if it is worth going back more often; that way if we picked the wrong item on the menu or the waiter was having a bad day, we don't hold it against the place forever. North Branch definitely redeemed itself on our second visit; it's a new restaurant overall, and they clearly worked out a lot of the bugs in the uneven service and taste of the food. Whew; their menu options sounded so good I would have been heartbroken if it was only the descriptions that were mouth-watering.

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And then, because I love a good dose of irony, I have to share Shelley's post titled "A Girl's Gotta Eat". :) Shelley has created a series with a group of bloggers called Adventures in Maintenance (AIM), and once a month they all post on the same subject. This one was about what they eat now that the dieting part is over and they are maintaining their weight. Good stuff!

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I saw this display at Banana Republic last month, and just fell in love. All the different yellows in one outfit, swoon! Too bad I don't have the clothes or the balls to duplicate it.

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Shopping Friend and I are going to our dress fitting this afternoon. Finally I get to see her in her wedding dress! I suspect there will be tears (on my part). I'm so happy for her...even though she is stressed to the gills now that the wedding is so close. As I said to her on FB, weddings are always a pain, marriage is the fun part.

Most of the time. ;-D

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I'm done with Color Project: Red so I will be putting together a recap post soon. Next up, either blues or blacks. Anyone got a preference?

I will also be doing a post about the weirdest bra I have ever owned. Just got it this week and it has been dubbed "The Magical Bra".

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That is all. Happy Friday! What are your plans this weekend?

Birthday trip recap, Part 1

The end of my birthday staycation was so great, I have been in denial all this week that is over. Ha!

The trip to New Buffalo was fantastic, exactly the break I needed. We stayed in the Four Winds casino hotel, which is done in a wooden beam/cozy furniture style. Very pretty!





Hubby joined me on Wednesday night, my actual birthday. We had cocktails at the martini bar in the casino, then a late dinner at the steakhouse.



I do love a good dirty martini; they gave me extra stuffed olives for my birthday. Yum!
I was also excited because my Christmas jacket from my mom got a good wearing again; the silky fabric with the lacy pattern is just perfect for a night out.



And look, Rose! Turns out I actually don't need an evening clutch -- I totally forgot I had this one from White House/Black Market -- another Christmas gift from my mom during our trip to Vegas a couple years back. It's got all the style elements I love in a clutch -- it's quilted, studded, sparkly material without being made of spangles, and is big enough to hold a wallet, phone, lipstick and even keys.

Hubby left the next day and went to work, while I drove around exploring my favorites spots in the area. First up was the New Buffalo beach. Beaches in winter are lovely, lovely places -- bleak and empty, with sharp contrasts in the elements and colors.



The parking lot is never empty in the summer.



Red beams on the benches are more eye-catching than usual.



Not a lot of humans, but the birds leave their mark.





The lighthouse stands tall, waiting for the summer visitors to return.



Hard to believe it's 30 degrees out looking at this view, isn't it?



I always wonder what they do to keep the sand from moving too much in the storms. Looks like they use a series of temporary fences.



Ice chunks line the edge of the water.






After that, I headed over to Sawyer for my long-awaited lunch. The Greenbush Brewery is well worth a stop if you are in that area. The beers are pretty good, but OMG the food is outstanding.




Just look at those options for snacks and soups! Blue cheese and cauliflower, are you kidding me? Bring a vat of that, please!!

I had my trusty Country Ham & Cheese and it was as fantastic as the last time. I cannot believe all the magic happens in that tiny space back behind the braided garlic.



They are expanding the kitchen now during the "slow" season. The place was still pretty full of hipsters, even for a random Thursday in March.



It's like Cheers, if Cliff Clavin owned a laptop. ;-D

Of course my next stop was right next door, to the Sawyer Garden Center. But this post is already pretty long so I will leave that for my next entry. I will give a sneak peek of some of the delights they had there: shamrocks!



P.S. Happy belated St. Patrick's Day!

Part 2 coming tomorrow. Promise.

Thanksgiving 2012: Leftovers

On the last day of Thanksgiving, there were leftovers.

All weekend, Hubby had been polishing off most of the leftovers in their purest form: he just makes himself another plate of his favorites and microwaves them.

Me, I like to repurpose. The first couple of days were sandwiches and soup, but on Sunday I decided to extend the life of what we had left a little bit longer.

First up was a variation on this Thanksgiving Salad. I heated up the last of the Brussels sprouts and green beans, some sweet potatoes and a chopped up slice of turkey in a skillet...




then cooked some quick couscous, and mixed it all together.



That should be lunch for the next couple of days.


Next was a variation of one of my favorite sandwich spreads, Turkey Salad with Cranberries.



I chopped up the last of the turkey (all those little pieces on the platter came in handy!), the last of the celery, and some dried cranberries. Seasoned it with Mural of Flavor and added fatfree mayo.



Yum.




YUM. On toast with carrot chips. Yesssssss...

I have another idea to meld two recipe ideas into Sweet Potato-Spinach Ravioli. First was from this recipe, then I saw that My Bizzy Kitchen made a great one with spinach that I knew I wanted to incorporate.

Unfortunately, work is taking over my life and I am getting a little tired of leftovers. We shall see if I end making that or if the sweet potatoes make it into a pot of soup or just the trash.  I'll let you know by Friday! ;-D

Thanksgiving shopping

I love Thanksgiving grocery shopping. Almost as much as I love cooking Thanksgiving dinner!



It was a lovely November Saturday, kind of brisk but sunny out. In my closet review, I pulled out a grey knit Old Navy vest from a few years ago, added a lighter grey Loft long-sleeved tee, a cotton black-and-ivory scarf, my Gap long and leans, and my silver Privos. When it got warmer out, I removed the scarf, but it all still worked fine.



Onto the shopping!

My first stop was Target, where I picked up general staples and brand items.



My menu includes a cranberry-pomegranate cocktail, thus the Ocean Spray. The gravy is for my mother-in-law; Hubby and I use the fresh cranberry sauce on our turkey, but she likes gravy and I don't know how to make it, nor do I have time in the heat of the preparations to make some from the drippings. She'll be happy to have one "normal" thing on her plate anyway. ;-)



Next stop was Whole Foods for the good seasonings and organic vegetables and eggs. Didn't like any of the Brussels sprouts at any of the stores, so they're still on my list for Tuesday night.



Jewel was quick and easy; they always have the size turkey breast I like, at the right price. A few more brand staples that they didn't have at Target too.



Last stop was Tony's Finer Foods for all the basic veggies. They had good prices on fresh herbs too -- sage, rosemary and parsley -- so I grabbed those to use instead of the dried versions I have at home.

So after all that, here is the menu:

Appetizer
Cranberry-pomegranate cocktail (either sparkling wine or vodka depending on what Hubby picks up)
Bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with goat cheese (inspired by Shopping Friend!)

Main meal
butternut squash soup (which I may make and serve on Wednesday night instead)
herbed roast turkey breast
homemade cranberry sauce
roasted Brussels sprouts with balsamic vinegar and thyme
roasted green beans with shallots
crescent rolls with roasted garlic and onion jelly (or butter, for the non- adventurous)
cornbread stuffing with sweet Italian turkey sausage (half of which will go to Shopping Friend)
cheesy horseradish mashed potatoes (or just plain roasted, Hubby is still choosing his preference)
slow-cooker spicy sweet potatoes (for me)

Dessert
pumpkin pie for MIL, apple for Hubby; hopefully I can find smaller tart versions because no one needs a pie to themselves.
(I don't like pie, so I save any remaining need for food for The Sandwich later that night.)

There are a couple of extra dishes in there than previous years, so I am not sure if I will keep them all. It's a crazy amount of food for three people, even if we are going to eat it for several days, and even if most of it is healthy and can be turned into other meals. I would love to ditch the mashed potatoes altogether; I can throw the sweets, green beans and turkey into a soup easily, but mashed potatoes are harder to turn into something else. I doubt MIL and Hubby will want to give them up, though.

We shall see what happens. I am already a day behind on preparations; I had planned to make the cornbread and a batch of oatmeal-pumpkin cookies on Sunday, but we got side-tracked on a different project. MIL is staying with us, so Hubby decided he needed to bring an old couch up from the basement to the spare room that he uses as an office. That plan did not work at all (he hadn't thought through how he was going to maneuver it through the kitchen and up the stairs without smashing everything in both rooms and ruining our new paint job), but instead I convinced him to deep-clean the office to make room for a new futon. He cleaned out closets and cabinets that had filled up with unused crap, and I tackled the various piles of paper that had become hidden into any corner we could find. In the end, we tossed about 10 bags of junk, I have a tub of paper to get shredded, and a trunk full of miscellaneous office things for donation. Then we got our new futon and put that together.



The futon cover is tan, Hubby bought a throw to cover it so the cats don't trash it too badly. Because we all know who will be using it more than the humans!



That shelf way in the back is all that remains of anything I used to store in the office. Thank you electronic bills; you have knocked down the amount of paper I need to have down to four little boxes. 

Anyway, today wasn't quite what I had in mind to prepare for Thanksgiving, but I think my MIL will be much more comfortable now than on an aerobed.

But! Lest you think I am some kind of amazing Thanksgiving planner/shopper, going to 4 stores with one list and preparing food for a week. Somehow I managed to do this:



Uh, didn't I cross it off the list after I bought it at...whoops, guess not. One will go in the freezer tomorrow.

I was proud that I did all that shopping and only bought this for myself as a treat:



Heh, I love my stories. (General Hospital is on a roll these days. All my favorite veterans are returning, hurray!)

What did you do this weekend to get ready for Turkey Day? Are you hosting or guesting? :)

Oven-dried Tomatoes, Frog Jam, and assorted Bentos

Rose Rounds asked how I made the oven-roasted tomatoes. I found the idea on The Local Beet, one of my favorite localvore blogs. They used juliet tomatoes, which are long like Romas but smaller in size. I couldn't find any of those, and the Roma's were too expensive. Tony's had a sale on "cocktail" for 79 cents a package, so I grabbed one of those to experiment with.



Local Beet said to set the temperature to 200 degrees, then stick them in for 8-12 hours, unattended. The problem was I took that "unattended" thing too literally, and I let them stay in the whole 12 hours. (In my defense, I was out for the afternoon during the key end time, so I didn't check on them at all.)

They ended up way too dry. A few crumbled to powder in my hand.



So I was out 79 cents. Lesson learned!

The next batch I used the cherry tomatoes from my Dad's garden. I really did not want to ruin these, and they were even smaller than the cocktails, so at about the 6 hour mark I checked on them. They had shrunken quite a bit, but all of them still had pockets of moisture on their bottoms. Every hour after that I checked again. At hour 8, many of the smaller tomatoes were ready (dried but still soft and chewy looking), so I pulled those out and let the rest keep drying. An hour later, they were all done.



Looking forward to using them in frittatas, salads, and maybe a sauce. 

Another lovely treat I've been enjoying this summer has been frog jam.

Yes, you read that right.



I picked up a jar in New Buffalo this summer, and I am IN LOVE. Way better than plum butter, and even the blackberry jam I got at the farmer's market earlier in the summer.

It isn't made of frogs, thank goodness. But can you guess the ingredients?



Figs - raspberries - orange peel - ginger. F-R-O-G, teehee.

It is F-A-N-T-A-S-T-I-C. It's raspberry, but with richer, sharper notes from the figs and ginger, and a nice burst from the orange peel at the end. I am definitely going to be looking for this again next year. (Or my next visit to the New Buffalo area.)

Despite all the lovely food photos I have taken this summer, I actually haven't been that good at maintaining the foodstyle; I've skipped more than a couple of Sunday Cooking sessions, especially as the summer waned, and I was pretty bad about bringing in lunches on a daily basis. That said, when I did do it, I ate really well. My goal this fall is just to do it more often.


PB&frog jam sandwich, yogurt, blackberries, and Mom's bread and butter pickles. Easiest lunch ever!


Drier's ham salad sandwich, deviled egg salad, black bean and corn salad, blacberries, and a handful of snack mix. This was leftovers from the vacation. :)


Kale frittata, blue cheese coleslaw, yogurt and watermelon.


One of my favorite grilled meals of the summer: portabello swiss sausages, pineapple, and onions. We ate this and our turkey-bacon wrapped chicken thighs most often on the grill this year.


Pretty table set during my parent's visit. Hmm, maybe we should eat at the table more this fall...

What was your favorite foodstuff this summer?

Labor Day weekend recap

My parents came for a visit over Labor Day weekend. They're from Connecticut, which actually more rural than you would think. There are roadside stands all over selling locally grown vegetables and fruit, and my dad has a pretty impressive garden of his own in his backyard. He grows his beloved tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, cucumbers, potatoes, beets, squash and zucchini, and I think peas and beans. And probably other things that he will remind me of shortly. :)

My mom has actually been canning a lot of it these last couple of years; she brought a couple of different kinds of pickles, hot pepper jelly, and honeybell orange marmalade as gifts this trip.

But they had never seen a farmer's market before, so we took them a couple of our favorites.


Heirloom tomatoes at the Glenview market



I wish I liked green beans more. Loved how they still were in the shape of the bushel basket!


My mom bought us a lovely bouquet of flowers, and the green glass vase from a vendor at the market too!

Cherry tomatoes from my dad's garden. They weren't quite ripe for our meals, so I ended up drying these for use in recipes this winter. (We ate the corn, though!)





Of course, then we had to cook the feast we bought. This was sweet potato squash, carrots, and onions, folded into a foil packet and grilled. It was AMAZING.




The first night we had Dad's summer squash, zucchini from the market, the packet above, and everyone's favorite turkey bacon-wrapped chicken thighs.




Hubby cooked, Dad oversaw the operation. :)



We hit another market on Sunday, as well as a couple of ethnic groceries. I am my parent's daughter: we all love food! :)

Monday we went downtown to play tourist. They had never seen the Bean before.







It was pretty hot that weekend, so the water display at Crown Fountain was in heavy use.





Mom and I left the boys to entertain themselves while we walked over to the Art Institute to see the Roy Lichtenstein exhibit.





It was the last day of the exhibit, so it was very crowded.



But I will leave the pictures of art for tomorrow's post. :)