I used to think the best strawberries in the world came from southern Louisiana. That was before I found southern Tennessee.
Sorry, Louisiana. You have been dethroned. These strawberries are like candy, many so sweet that it seems like somebody has already dipped them in sugar.
I found them at the Dennison’s Family Farm strawberry stand on Hughes Road in Madison. There are a few more stands around the Huntsville area; check out Dennison’s Facebook page to find one near you.
Posted in Eats, Photographs | Tagged Dennison's Family Farm, food, Huntsville, iPhone, photograph, strawberries, summer | 1 Comment »
Yikes. Who’s running this thing?
In the past three weeks, I’ve been to New York City and back, completed a pretty involved school research project and fretted over my elderly grandmother and a broken ocean. I also made the most awesome banana-walnut ice cream of all time and embarked on several new personal and professional projects.
More to come.
Posted in Travel, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
When I bought my new ceramic cooktop, I ditched both of my old, stained non-stick skillets. The non-stick surface was beginning to wear off anyway, and I just didn’t trust them not to scratch or crack my delicate new appliance.
My new set of stainless steel pots and pans, however, is anything but non-stick. This has only been a problem for two household favorites: grilled cheese sandwiches and scrambled eggs. The dusty, nearly forgotten George Foreman Grill took care of the grilled cheese dilemma, but my only option for eggs seemed to be cooking them in a big puddle of butter to keep them from sticking. Forget about omelets.
This is where Christy Jordan of SouthernPlate.com comes in. If you eat, you ought to visit this website. Christy can spin a yarn and show you how to make delicious creations at the same time. Pretty soon you’ll know all about her family, vacations and grocery shopping habits.
When she shared a recipe for an Easy Oven Omelet a few weeks ago, I knew I may have found my solution for eggs.
That recipe resulted in the best egg dish I had ever made – it was more or less a souffle. It even won over my husband, who I feared wouldn’t be able to deal with all the onions.
The only problem: It made enough for at least three meals for two people. I ate leftover omelet for lunch twice, which is one time too many, and guiltily tossed the rest.
So I broke out my apron and started customizing. I decided not to cut the recipe in half, opting to quarter it since, frankly, one day of leftover omelet isn’t much tastier than two. Made with mozzarella cheese and roasted red peppers, it was delicious, but my mistake was putting it in a baking dish that was too wide. It came out of the oven not much thicker than a pancake.
The answer came to me yesterday: ramekins. My customized recipe made just enough omelet “batter” for two servings, each in its own cute little serving dish. No leftovers here.
Here’s the basic recipe, but as Christy points out, you can substitute pretty much any cheese or vegetable you like. The only reason I used roasted red peppers is because I had part of a jar left in the fridge from another recipe. A mix of chopped bell pepper and onion is also good.
Shaggerty’s Oven Omelet for Two
(Adapted from SouthernPlate.com’s Easy Oven Omelet)
Spray two ramekins with cooking spray. Beat the eggs in a medium mixing bowl. Add the other ingredients and stir until well combined. Split mixture between two ramekins. Bake in a 350-degree oven for 25-30 minutes, or the omelets are firm and don’t jiggle when you shake them.
Posted in Eats, Home, Photographs | 2 Comments »
I had a Dr Pepper last week, probably the first in three or four years.
It was overwhelmingly delicious. I paid more attention to my soda than I did my meal; every sip was a burst of out-of-this-world flavor.
You’re shrugging. Nothing special about Dr Pepper, right? Just another soda.
The thing is that it WASN’T just another soda.
I gave up soda as an everyday beverage about five years ago. I might order one when we eat out, but overall I average about two sodas a month.
Which brings me back to the Dr Pepper. It was delectable simply because it was rare.
The whole episode made me wonder: How many foods do we consume every day that should be rarities? How much better would some things taste if we weren’t eating them day in, day out?
How much healthier would we be?
If a little delayed gratification makes tasty things even tastier, isn’t the initial denial worth it?
I’ll let you know next year, when I have another Dr Pepper.
Posted in Eats | Tagged beverage, delayed gratification, diet, Dr Pepper, flavor, food, nutrition, soda | 4 Comments »
Several years ago, my grandmother gave me an old rocking chair that I kept meaning to have re-caned. Last year, I decided that it did not go with any part of my decor. Neither was it very smart furniture to have around our two long-tailed tabby cats, constantly underfoot and underchair.
Turns out that my mom thought she should have had first dibs on the chair anyway. Done deal, right?
Wrong. Yang, the larger of the underfoot tabbies, claimed the chair as his own not two weeks after Mom claimed it as her own. Cushioned with a Mom-made afghan and a blanket, it’s one of his favorite nesting spots.
So, the chair complements nothing, needs refinishing, and technically belongs to my mom. It stays, of course, because a 13-year-old, 12-pound cat likes to nap in it.
Welcome to the Crow Haggerty House of Cats. We’re all mad here.
Posted in As Pictured Below, Cats, Family, Home, Photographs | Tagged animals, antique, cats, chair, decor, decorating, furniture, grandmother, home, long-tailed, mother, re-caning, refinishing, rocking chair, tabby cats | 3 Comments »
I picked up these note cards at a street market in New York City last year and promptly began neglecting to frame them. Now they’re framed and I have to find a place for them. I’m thinking they’d look great staggered on the wall beside the stairs … more on that when I finally punch three holes in the wall with my fabulous MonkeyHooks.
The artist is Kristiana Parn, and I simply love her colorful, eclectic work. Head to her website at www.kristianaparn.com to see more of her art; she also has items available in her Etsy shop.
Posted in As Pictured Below, Home, Photographs, Travel | Tagged animals, art, artist, birds, color, colorful, eclectic, Etsy, frame, framing, giraffe, Kristiana Parn, MonkeyHook, New York, New York City, note cards, rabbit, street market | 2 Comments »
Ever manage to inadvertently start following a healthy eating pattern?
This weekend, I realized that I’ve established two useful food guidelines over the past few years: I don’t eat in the car, and I don’t eat in front of the TV.
Both situations came about entirely by accident.
I purchased a car with a manual transmission six years ago, meaning that the “extra” hand required to eat while driving is only accessible when cruising speed has been reached on the interstate. City driving does not free up this hand. As a bonus, the car’s tiny cupholders are a marvel of engineering; the two up front are too small for anything but a 12-ounce soda can, and the larger one between the buckets seats requires the flexibility of a Cirque performer to reach.
The living room embargo is a bit more complicated. As we watched the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina approach our home in Mobile in 2005, we grabbed our table from the dining room and flipped it onto the bed in hopes of keeping it dry. We ended up with only the back third of the house flooded, but the teardown, rewiring, rebuilding, re-everything meant that the table was taken apart and stored in the bedroom closet for the better part of two years.
What I discovered during this time was that no matter your intentions, eating dinner in the living room off of the coffee table pretty much ensures that you WILL turn the TV on. It’s just what happens. And once the TV is on, conversation is off.
The first thing I set up upon arrival in Huntsville, therefore, was the table. There have been no dinners in front of Smallville, no breakfasts in front of The Soup. Just talking, newspaper-reading, and, occasionally, a subtle Pandora soundtrack.
Not eating dinner in the living room leads to not eating much of anything in the living room except for the rare bowl of movie popcorn. Nobody heads to the kitchen and grabs a bag of chips to mindlessly munch on; nobody sits down with a sleeve of cookies to polish off.
Focused eating is more likely to be healthy eating, and dining without distraction makes for much better family time. And you don’t have to buy a manual transmission or wait for a flood: Declare the driver’s seat off limits for noshing, and insist that nothing crosses the dining room border but popcorn. In both cases, your seat cushions and your waistline will thank you.
Posted in Eats, Family, Home | Tagged alabama, conversation, cupholders, diet, dining room, eating, flood, floodwaters, food, food guidelines, health, healthy, Huntsville, hurricane, Hurricane Katrina, manual transmission, Mobile, Pandora, remodeling, rewiring, table | 3 Comments »
Forget about March 20. When the small cat casts a shadow at 7 a.m. on a Monday and the temperature approaches 70 degrees, spring is declared. Cropped pants shall ensue.
Posted in As Pictured Below, Cats, Photographs | Tagged animals, cats, cropped pants, iPhone, photograph, spring | 1 Comment »
OK, I know I sound like a shill, but you should totally buy a share in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program this summer.
I had the best time last year with my weekly pickups from Dennison’s Family Farm in Elora, Tenn. It really did turn into my own version of Iron Chef, having to work with whatever ingredients showed up in the box each week. And since there are few things scarier for my husband to hear than the statement “I made something new for dinner,” it’s somewhat of a miracle that he had a blast with it, too.
It’s a lesson in the natural cycle of crops for those who aren’t used to the whims of Mother Nature. For example, last year’s rains made for a very short corn crop, so I didn’t get nearly the amount of corn I had expected, but I got tons of tomatoes, chard and peppers of all varieties. And strawberries. Not those tasteless baby-fist-sized strawberries you get at the grocery store, but juicy, delectable berries, so many that you can’t eat them all and will be forced to make the best ice cream ever with them. Darn the luck.
Some folks tell me that they just prefer to go to the farmer’s market, which is cool if you like rolling out of bed before 9 a.m. on Saturdays. Which, truthfully, I have been known to do. But what I find myself not doing at the farmer’s market is buying something I’m unfamiliar with, or buying so much of something that I have enough to freeze for later. (I’ve got two more servings of zucchini/onion/garlic soup base in the freezer, and I just ran out of frozen bell pepper slices in January.) Even if you’re not going to get into canning, you can still have a little taste of summer when it’s 30 degrees outside.
Seriously, it was the best summer food-wise that I’ve had since that summer in the early 1980s when my grandfather and I grew a huge patch of watermelons and I ate my weight in fresh tomatoes.
Head to Dennison’s page on LocalHarvest for details on its 10-week program, or search for a CSA closer to you.
Posted in CSA, Eats | Tagged childhood, cooking, corn, crops, CSA, Dennison's Family Farm, family, farm, farmer's market, food, grandfather, husband, ice cream, Iron Chef, LocalHarvest, mississippi, Mother Nature, South, strawberries, summer, tomatoes, watermelons | 9 Comments »
Entirely Adequate 