Well, it was the last day for the visit from the grandkids and their friends and we decided to send them off with a breakfast special. They all like French toast, they all like bananas, and Bev has been eager to make Bananas Foster so we decided to marry the two. I modified the French toast recipe from Ina Garten and increased it by 50%.
The grandkids had requested BBQ during their visit so I fired up the smoker and cooked a pork butt, two racks of spare ribs, chicken thighs, and wings. We ate the ribs and wings for supper then I used the pulled pork and chicken thighs for Hispanic dishes.
Eric’s kids, Matthew and Luca, wanted to come spend some time in East Tennessee and with us on the lake. Matthew brought his college girlfriend and Luca brought a friend from home for a nice eight-day visit. We’d seen Matthew recently but it’s been six years since we’ve seen Luca as our RV trips that included a visit with them kept getting canceled – covid, coach issues, etc.
My mom occasionally made creamed chip beef on toast when I was a kid and Dad always complained because, while serving during WWII, he said they ate it about every day – I can’t recall if he would eat Mom’s or not. But, like most things gravy, I still really enjoy it.
We had made a version of this broccoli casserole several years ago but I updated it for a larger dish and a different assembly method as shown in the recipe below. It's different than the usual holiday version of broccoli in that it contains rice. I topped this one with cheese but the traditional crumb topping can also be used. The original recipe calls for boiling the chicken then using the water for the rice but I hate to boil the flavor from the chicken so I baked it and added some Chicken Better Than Bullion to the rice cooking water.
I really like eating fresh, local, summer garden vegetables and we plan many meals around them. Bev, the pups, and I made a trip to Maryville (about 18 miles) for stops at the Coning Farm Market and another market in town to get a loaf of Tellico Grains Bakery Olive Bread. As a result, my supper plan for the day changed to boiled corn and a unique tomato sandwich.
Let’s deal with the second part of the title first. We had planned a little hot dog cookout on the dock for Independence Day. But when I saw the weather forecast predicting 96F (actual was 97F and thank heaven for A/C), I suggested we celebrate on July 5 when it would be overcast and 88F. Even though it’s cooler down at the lake and we have great ceiling fans, I didn’t want to eat down there that bad. So, we opted to cook a summertime meal in the air conditioned kitchen. The highlight of the day was when friend and house cleaner, Karen, showed up to work on the holiday.
Happy Birthday America
We decided for our next seafood meal that it would be blackened grouper using the Caribbean Grouper that we bought at Joe Patti’s Seafood in Pensacola. I believe we bought eight pieces the same size as these two.
We are trying to take advantage of our ability to buy real vine ripened (not picked partially green), local tomatoes and after many, many taste tests over the years of growing tomatoes, we try to get Cherokee Purples when we can.
During Madison’s recent visit, I made a pan-fried seafood meal and I was anxious to make a deep-fried seafood platter. I used the shrimp and scallops from our Joe Pattie Seafood haul and crappie from our normal source and our go-to breading recipe from Food Network – I made half a breading recipe shown below.
I had been wanting to make some ravioli from wonton wrappers for a while and finally decided to take the plunge for supper with Eliza and her parents. I looked around the web and found the recipe for Homemade Italian Sausage and Cheese Ravioli on the Ashlee Marie blog. Since I wanted to ensure plenty of filling, I increased the filling ingredients by 50% otherwise, I followed the filling recipe. Since I'd never done this before, I bought both wonton and egg roll wrappers to experiment with. I made a few then Wende made the bulk of them.
I’ve had this pork dish on my list to make for quite a while and it finally made it to the top. The recipe for Grilled Bourbon and Cherry Pork Chops comes from famous pitmaster and Big Bob Gibson’s Bar-B-Q chef Chris Lilly by way of the “Nibble Me This” blog. As you can see, the recipe is for pork chops but when I checked the freezer, I couldn’t find those that I thought I had but I did find a couple of pork tenderloins and used them instead. I increased the sauce ingredients by 50% and didn’t dunk the meat in it while cooking because I wanted plenty to spoon over the meat after slicing and I used a gas grill.
Many people love asparagus wrapped in prosciutto and baked so I decided to adopt the recipe for breakfast using what we had on hand. While we enjoy asparagus baked, sauteed, and grilled, I prefer it steamed so it stays nice and plump – the other methods cook the water out. We had some from-our-garden asparagus in the fridge along with some eggs and country ham – prosciutto is just Italian country ham that has been aged longer and usually sliced thin.
So I steamed the asparagus, chopped and sauteed the ham,
and poached some eggs to get this delicious breakfast which Bev called five
star. 5/21/24
Even though it was cool and rainy during their visit, Madison and boyfriend, Zach, managed to get in some jet ski riding, a couple of walks around the area, and some time with her Meme.
If you’ve read my blog for a while, you likely recall that Madison lived with us for a few years spread over two visits but she hasn’t been here in quite a while so we were excited when she arranged a visit with her boyfriend Zach. Since she had several food requests, it appears this was primarily a culinary visit and of course we were happy to oblige. The only challenge was that Zach is gluten intolerant but we are used to cooking for good buddy Joe who has the same issue.
One of the reasons we did not want to miss the Pensacola RV rally was so we could go to Joe Patti’s Seafood and buy good, fresh fish at wholesale prices ($9.99/lb. for 16-20 size shrimp for example). We’ve had this large 20 gallon cooler for many years and have only used it a time or two but it was perfect for this use.
Maybe you didn't know this but I eat a lot of fried eggs for breakfast and very few poached ones – don’t worry, I’m not starting a series on poached eggs. I don’t do poached eggs very often for a few reasons:
1. They take longer while waiting for the water to boil.
2. I don’t like losing the egg that turns into the wispy whites.
3. I haven’t had much luck cooking them correctly and without sticking.
On day three of the rally, we were invited over to our Rally Master’s (Barb & Bill) home for a cookout and visit to their treehouse (nice to have members who live in Pensacola). The tree house is hanging from the branches with only one bolt in the tree and it has already survived a couple of hurricanes.
This is a very eclectic meal as the three dishes don’t necessarily go together but I wanted to make the pork and the potatoes, and Bev decided we needed something green so she added slaw.
I love pulled pork, Mojo Sauce is one of my favorite parts of a Cuban sandwich and I love my slow
cooker so when Claudia posted the recipe for Slow Cooker Mojo Pork on her
“What’s Cooking Italian” blog, I was all in.
Then I decided that with no gluten and having it cook while we do happy
hour, it would be perfect for Friday cards.
Bev ended up with an 8¾ lb. pork butt so I doubled the marinade
ingredients, I changed some of the ingredients a little, and made it as a
pulled vs. sliced pork dish but the original recipe plus Claudia’s pics can be found by
clicking on the above link.
Finally something besides food to post about.
For this second day of the rally (not much happened on day 1), a visit to the Pensacola Naval Air Station was planned including a tour of the Naval Air Museum and watching the Blue Angels practice but the whole thing fell through when the base was closed to visitors. So, for a fill in activity, we went on a two-hour dolphin cruise on Pensacola Bay.
Have you wondered why I'm including two dishes on most posts - even by doing this I already have posts lined up thru Jun 16. I could post more often but like the three day interval.
I’m getting toward the end of my series on scrambled eggs (2 more) using recipes from the “The Taste Of Home’s” 30 New Ways To Eat Scrambled Eggs and now is a good time for this one as we have some country ham on hand. Prosciutto is basically country ham (in Italian) that has been cured for a longer period (a year or so) than our normal country ham and it is normally sliced very thin. For this meal, I used the recipe for Prosciutto & Cheddar Breakfast Biscuits from Taste Of Home, as the previous dishes have been but I omitted the biscuits.
We recently attended a rally for our RV travel club (even though we stayed in a motel) in Pensacola, FL and a pot luck supper was on tap for the arrival day meal. Since we would be driving down in the car and arriving shortly before the meal, I planned our contribution to be something I could make at home and heat up after we got to the rally. The dish I chose was Loaded BBQ Pork Potato Casserole from the “Mom On Time Out” blog and I followed the recipe as shown below.
This post was supposed to come out around Apr 25 but somehow, I totally forgot it - perhaps I was excited because Bev had just gotten home from St. Maarten.
I was going to take a short break from scrambles until I had a dozen eggs in a supermarket plastic bag that fell out of the car when I opened the door. I ended up with four undamaged, two slightly cracked, and six broken, so just enough for two scrambles and I picked recipes that included my avocados that needed to be eaten. The scrambles are still coming from “The Taste Of Home’s” 30 New Ways To Eat Scrambled Eggs. The first recipe is Salsa & Scrambled Egg Sandwiches and I adjusted it down for two servings and I added no salsa to the eggs fearing it would make them watery.
Boy, have we been hoo-dood into thinking we need to spend a lot of money on pans to make good meals at home. Many, many years ago, Bev & I were considering what pans to buy for the kitchen in our new home and we had the opportunity to attend a cooking demonstration put on by the restaurant chef where we were staying on vacation. After the demonstration we asked him what kind of pans he uses and his answer surprised me – “whatever the restaurant furnishes”.
This is a set of All-Clad and note the copper disk in the bottom to insure even heat distribution - $1299 on Amazon.
Our neighbor, Steve, got this shot of the Northern Lights last week.
I have always enjoyed potato skins and would have thought I'd made them before but if so, I can’t remember it and there is no post on my blog, so this may well be my maiden voyage. I’ve been wanting to make them for a while so rather than cook a meal for our Friday card night, I asked everyone to bring an appetizer and I made potato skins using the recipe for Baked Potato Skins from the “Small Town Woman” blog. I increased the amounts by 50% to get the recipe below but you can see the original plus pics by clicking on the link.
It’s been a long time since we’ve made this soup but while organizing the pantry recently, I discovered several cans of clams that had been on hand for awhile so I decided it was time to make it again. I had planned a different meal for this day as Bev’s birthday meal but when Eliza called to wish her Meme a happy birthday, she also invited herself down so I switched to the much easier chowder for the meal, plus it was a fifties overcast day so still pretty good for soup. This is the Ina Garten’s recipe and I followed the recipe for 6-8 servings. I sure prefer recipes that use measurable amounts (I used one onion, 7 celery stalks, and 5 carrots) plus I chopped my veggies smaller than she did on her video – larger makes for a better presentation but smaller is easier to eat.
We have had some really good scrambles from 30 New Ways To Eat Scrambled Eggs from "Taste Of Home" and the latest dish is simply called Avocado Scrambled Eggs and I adjusted the recipe down from four to two servings.
If you like fast food breakfast biscuits and don’t pass by the restaurants very often just buy a dozen of your favorite biscuits (Hardees, McDonalds, Bojangles, etc.), freeze them individually and store in a bag in the freezer. Then, when you need a biscuit sandwich fix you are ready as I was with this meal. I had ham, Swiss cheese, and egg on hand to make this one. I just nuked the biscuit a little to warm it then the cheese and ham then cooked the egg.
After months of pain resulting from a bad hip including an infection (that was cured), Cindy now has a new hip and is beginning her recovery and it's great to see her smiling.
Continuing with my breakfast scrambles from “The Taste Of Home’s” 30 New Ways To Eat Scrambled Eggs/, the next one up came from a recipe for Mushroom-Avocado Eggs On Toast but I made it as a scramble. It called for brie but I didn’t want to buy it just for this dish so I used some goat cheese that I had on hand for another recipe. While I used the same ingredients, portioned down for one serving, the original recipe is nowhere close to the scrambled egg dish I made so click on the link above for the actual recipe and pics. The original, below, looks delicious and I may try it sometime but I’m making scrambles for now.
By picking two patches, I have asparagus out the wazoo and this is what I get every other day without picking the little ones so I'm eating plenty of it in different dishes and this bunch went to the neighbor.
I took a break from my series on scrambled eggs and made an asparagus omelet using the small spears and a recipe from All Recipes simply named Asparagus Omelet that I modified for a single serving.
My Honey got home from St. Marten on Friday, just in time for her Sat. birthday and all of us boys are really happy. Her little boy (only child and now 53) sent her flowers and I'm making one of favorite meals tomorrow.
I’ll never forget my first visit to Hooters in Sarasota, FL. I’d never heard of it but a friend of my Dad, took us there for lunch while I was visiting my parents. I was in my mid 30’s and recently divorced and was in total shock when our super-hot server came to take our orders – I do recall eating a grouper sandwich š.
Pork rinds may well be my favorite snack food and I buy the 16 oz container of them from Sam’s for $6.28 and they last me a week or so. As we’ve gone to various festivals over the years, there is often a vendor selling fried pork rinds and I noticed they use small pieces of pork skins that they had purchased.
After my first sausage gravy meal that was just two biscuits, I decided to go on the hunt for different scrambled egg dishes to side them with and since our asparagus is now bearing, it seemed like a good place to start. I did a web search and ended up on the “Taste Of Home” site titled 30 New Ways to Eat Scrambled Eggs. Since they didn’t have one for asparagus, I just made up the one below.
I’ve been eating sausage gravy all of my life and have heard the term sawmill gravy for a long time and I thought I knew about these two gravies, but I learned something today. When I read the post for Sawmill Gravy With Sausage on the “My Country Table” ) blog, I scratched my head as I thought sawmill gravy was sausage gravy. So off to do research I went – I love the internet most of the time.
For the years I’ve lived in Tennessee, restaurant gravy and biscuits was usually good biscuits covered with this white paste-like stuff containing little to no meat. Well, as I just learned that that is Sawmill Gravy.
It was time for our weekly meal out and I was ready for catfish again so off to Countryside Restaurant we went. As I told our waitress, I’ve never had better and she said it was one of their most popular dishes. We decided to beat the crowd and get there at 11:30 but it seems everyone else had the same idea as the parking lot was full and the restaurant was pretty full and there was probably 15 more that came in right behind us.
One of Bev’s favorite lunches is refried beans which she makes and freezes when we cook a big batch of pintos – they are not really refried but are mashed and doctored with several items. After bragging about the white beans served to me at Angie’s Kitchen a couple of times, Bev suggested we make some white beans so she can see how they work for her refried beans. Rather than going to the store, we used a pound each of navy bean and great northern beans that we had on hand and I started with our pinto bean recipe and adjusted it to get the one below.
I can’t say for sure but I suspect that when chicken tenders are offered on a menu, they are really just sliced breast and I assume the same thing for chicken nuggets, although some seem to be formed, processed chicken. Where tenders are generally the length of a breast, nuggets are generally more round or square and mine are a combination of both.
We had some Royal Red Shrimp in the freezer that needed to be used so I went to my blog in search of dishes we have rated highly in the past. We made this dish a few years ago and thought it was delicious and great for a keto diet meal but this time we served it over rice pilaf. The original recipe for Creamy Tuscan Shrimp came from the “Gimme Delicious” blog and can be found by clicking on the link.
As I’ve posted many times, we buy our eggs from a local couple so we can get the best ones possible. Their chickens were on strike most of the winter forcing us to buy from the store but they have now began laying with a vengeance and we’re being offered 10 dozen pretty regularly. So, this time, I found homes for several dozen and decided to turn one doz. into egg salad. We have used several recipes for egg salad over the years including a couple of Masters Tournament clones (I’d think there could only be one), your recipes, and our normal where Bev just makes it to taste.
