Life Eaters

Poached egg on cheesy toast with truffle oil and tomatoes

Okay, so this was just over a week ago, and with Dunchfest and SantaCon and lots of other great adventures distancing myself from this wonderful brunch, I’ll just keep the details short and sweet and let the photos speak for themselves.

Alyssa woke me up the morning of my birthday last Saturday with promises for something wonderful for all of my senses, one of which was an incredible, delectable Saturday morning home cooked brunch. On the menu was pesto twice baked potatoes, lemon ricotta crepes with blueberry topping and bananas, and an amazing truffle-cheese toast with a poached egg. Seriously, I was in heaven.

Eats brunch

Heirloom Tomatoes at The Wedge this summer.

As we now begin our voyage into that wonderful time of year that involves scraping our car windows in the morning and bundling up to go get the mail I thought I would pay hommage to the things that get me through the long winter days…. Heirloom Tomatoes!  The Wedge had this pile of heirlooms this summer that brought a single tear to my eye.  It was exotic. provocative and utterly mouth watering…. and yes, I AM talking about the tomatoes, not DP, who was also there.  The other things that get me through winter are:

Charlie Brown Christmas Trees!

Sledding Wranglor

Hot Chocolate

Reading by the fire

Waking up to new snowfalls

Slippers, sweater and throw blankets

Snuggling up for movie marathons

Christmas Eve!!! FFF!!!

Snow Days

Opening our canned vegetbles

Tax Time…most days

Movie dates

Snow boots, scarves, mittens and hats

Blizzards

Christmas cards

Mariah Carey’s Christmas album

Ice Skating

NYC in the winter

Dunchfest

Hoodies

Soup on a cold day

Orgasm Heat (you know, when the sun is out and it warms up your car when you get in from the cold)

There are so many more things that make living in Minnesota during the 5 months of winter worth every moment.  It brings together people of all walks of life in an endeavor to all survive and thrive to see another summer.

Adventures

Feta Cheese Stuffed Roasted Red Pepper and Rosemary Turkey Burgers with Crispy Prosciutto and Pesto Toppings with Rosemary Roasted Potatoes and Yellow Tomatoes with Cottage Cheese

Sarah instigated Tuesdays are Taken in an effort to never again let a whole week go by without seeing each other…we live under that same roof afterall!  So for this season of TAT, we are watching The Biggest Loser and cooking anything and everything that will get us on that show eventually.  Tonight we fired up the grill for these delicious turkey burgers.  Tuesdays are Taken are also fast becoming the night of the week that I get to cook with meat.  🙂  These burgers were as good reheated as they were the night of.  Turkey surprisingly makes great burgers and meatballs too!  It has the same texture of ground beef, but seems to absorb the flavors of the complimentary ingredients better than beef.  It also doesn’t feel like a greasy brick after scarfing it down.

Sarah gives the meal a “best burgers I’ve ever eaten, but didn’t like the prosciutto as much 8.7”

Alyssa gives it a “9.4 for the turkey burger surprise sneak attack and an extra point for the bacon… bacon always gets an extra point.”

Eats Burgers, TAT, Turkey

Pickled Green Beans

When I woke up this morning I found a mountain, literally, of canned pickled green beans.  With the help of Sarah and Nicki, we were able to can 22 jars of delicious organic spicy green beans, with the plan of giving them out for Christmas to our friends.  At this point though, I’ll consider it a Christmas miracle if they last that long sitting on my counter.  God they look amazing.

Absolutely gorgeous. The jars all stuffed and ready for the brine!

Brine, bring to a boil:

2.5 c. water

2.5 c. vinager

1/4 c. salt

Each jar had green beans, onions, julienned carrots, garlic cloves, thai and jalepeno peppers, dill, peppercorns and mustard seeds.   MMM.  Let’s hope we didn’t just brew a batch of botchulism….

Eats Canning

We started out with one big batch of this, throwing in lots of carrots, onion, chiles and loads of coconut milk, then we split it up and did half with fish and half with mock duck. the fish we may have overcooked a little bit as it was a little dry, but the mock duck was spectacular.

If we were to do it again, maybe add a little more spice, and some sort of zing, maybe lemongrass or thai basil. I’m really really looking forward to the leftovers that are in my fridge right now.!

Eats curry

Nate Johnson and Alyssa showing off their golden joystick trophies they got for winning the Wii Tennis tournament

Trevor threw the video game party to beat all video game parties. Highlights included the Wii Tennis Tourny, Pain on the projection screen, duck hunt closet, laundry room hideaway, Guitar hero upstairs and lots of Mountain Dew, Doritos and Pizza Bites.

Alyssa won the Golden Joystick with her partner, Nate Johnson, A newbie wii player.

Adventures video games

Orgasmic Mac and Cheese

Inspired by the mac and cheese I made last week, Alyssa and I decided to make one one of the mac and cheese recipies from one of our new favorite food blogs (what we’re eating .com). And hot damn, this was good. We included lots of baby portabella mushrooms and drizzled some truffle oil over the top. The wole recipe can be found here.

We substituted rigatoni for the run-of-the-mill elbow noodles that the recipe called for because, well, it was just a good idea. The cheese base was basicly a Bechamel sauce (flour, milk, herbs) with lots of cheese added in. We tried to sneak the goat cheese past Nicki, but it didn’t work, she detected it right away.

Eats Mac and Cheese, Pasta

Apple, Butternut Squash, Endive, Pomegranate Seeds, Dried Cranberries and Blue Cheese Salad with Lemon and Balsamic Vinaigrette Dressing

For our magical dinner party when Dania was in town for only one night.  Followed by those deliscious parm cups full of creamy cheesy goodness and then the rock your face off fish tower of splendor………

And then a delicous Apple and Persimmon Crisp to finish it off.  I don’t even remember eating this, maybe due to the copious amounts of wine consumed over dinner.  Way to go Camp Fox!!!!  And thanks for visiting Dania!  It was pure magic.

Eats Fish, Salad

Well. Here’s the first posting in our blog. Still a lot of things we need to do with it, but I’ll get to that. In the meantime. Here’s what I made on Sunday night. I didn’t have the heart to spend the extra money on the Creme Fraiche or the cave aged Comte cheese, so I substituted with a mix of Gruyere and Fontina for the Comte, and Creame Cheese and a little extra heavy whipping cream for the Creme Fraiche.

Baked Mac and Cheese with Cauliflour, Gruyere, Fontina and Cream Cheese

Eats Mac and Cheese, Pasta