I’m not the only one who’s been a blogging slacker. Keera and Ted, among many others, are also having a hard time trying to keep up with their regular posting schedules. In my case, the distraction is coming from seasonal fun, summer projects, and lots of cooking, so here’s a bit of (my own) food porn for you all — a recent potage of lentils. Yum!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted any food porn. The weather has gotten warm here, with some summer-like temperatures in the past week. So, that means we make a shift away from a lot of soups for dinner in favor of cooler salads. One of our favorites is what we call simply “big salad,” and it changes according to what we have in the fridge, but basically consists of everything we can find to toss in there…
Oooh, it’s gotten cold here in Tennessee — which is perfect soup weather! (And a perfect opportunity for food porn — these photos are fresh off my camera today!)
Here is DH’s traditional Nouvelle Année Gumbo. He made a big batch last night, so there’s plenty left over. It’s a thick and spicy soup featuring, among other things, shrimp, sausage, and okra.
And I just finished whipping up my first batch of Black Eye Pea and Tomato Broth. It’s seasoned with chili pepper, cilantro, cumin, and turmeric (in Israel, this soup is known as Lubiya), so it also has a bit of a kick to it!
I have some photos to share from this past Saturday evening (before we came home to a bit of drama). We got to have dinner with a group of friends at the home of a woman whose Russian mother was visiting from Moscow. Much to our delight, Mom kindly prepared a traditional Russian dinner for us all, which was both a visually beautiful and an absolutely delicious meal!
The meal started with what I think are called pirozhki — small pies with either meat or cabbage baked inside. You can see them in the background of the first two photos.
After the appetizers we enjoyed some borshch, a very light and tasty beet and vegetable soup. I could have made an entire meal out of just this one course, which was thick with veggies!
After the soup, we enjoyed a delicious winter salad, which was appropriate, since it was the evening of the solstice. This was a meat-vegetable-potato-egg dish that was the most substantial part of the meal. It was a struggle to avoid eating too much as it was so good, but also quite filling and I was trying to pace myself without knowing what to expect next.
The salad was followed by some caviar — a rare treat! Apparently it appears more regularly on the Russian table, but to me it is quite the delicacy! The caviar was served on buttered bread, so this was bit lighter than the previous course, and made a great transition to the meal’s conclusion.
We wrapped up the meal with some very thin crepes, which we rolled and dipped in a fruit whip. It was a wonderful conclusion to an impressive dinner — one that I very much prefer to the way we end meals in the US. I’m not a big fan of the rich, heavy sweets that most Americans bring out for dessert so I usually skip the final course when eating out (and at home, we don’t bother with it at all), but this was very light and tasty and with just a hint of sweetness, so I thought it was just right for the end of the meal.
This the first time I’ve had a whole meal of authentic Russian cuisine and it really whetted my appetite for more! Of course, it was served with wine (or vodka!), and the company was just as impressive as the food. We really enjoyed the conversation, along with some great stories about life in Moscow. It was a rare holiday season treat. If you ever have the opportunity to sample some Russian food, I highly recommend it!
In the beginning, there was The Bird. And it was good.
And on the fourth day, when the people of the land were beginning to tire of leftover turkey, there was The Soup. And it was good.
The Thanksgiving turkey
The turkey and wild mushroom soup
Big Stupid Tommy linked to a blogger’s story about people dumping the ashes of people at Disneyland this week. It reminded me that I haven’t posted much about my recent adventures, which involved both the scattering of ashes and Disney — though not contemporaneously, but rather as back-to-back events.
First was a family gathering here in Chattanooga for the anniversary of my mother’s death last year. We got together down here because her family has their own cemetery in Huntsville. Everyone stayed at my house and we drove down to Alabama for the day on the 30th. My mother has a stone next to the graves of her parents, and we scattered some of her ashes there during a service before having lunch together and going over to my grandparents’ old neighborhood to visit with friends and see a few landmarks. We had our lunch at the tiny church my grandfather attended in his retirement (he was a presbyterian minister), which has a beautiful little sanctuary:
It’s one of the great things about fall (via americablog).
So, back in the days before the Internet, what would you have done if your kid came home from college for the weekend and handed you a slab of wild boar meat?
I don’t know how we ever survived back in those dark times. Fortunately, I did have the option to check the ‘net and I found out that wild boar is best cooked slowly, and at a low temperature.
It was quite delicious.
This is the roasted quail stuffed with zucchini, mushrooms and bacon, served with gouda grits at St. John’s Meeting Place (I took this picture when we were there last weekend as part of DH’s birthday celebration).
There’s a bug going around town — an upper respiratory thing. DD was dragging herself around with it this weekend and I’m hearing reports of others getting knocked out by it as well. So, Sunday afternoon I made a huge batch of chicken soup (curative for DD, prophylactic for DH and I). And as always, it’s good stuff (if I do say so myself)!
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for insect bites, and some evil bug (fire ant?) bit me a few times under the strap of my teva when I was out bike riding yesterday — the itching kept me up during the night and despite lots of ice, by morning my foot was swelled up to a pretty impressive size. Now if only I could come up with a soup for that…
