Tuesday, March 26, 2024

There’s Egg Salad Then There’s This

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.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Our Coach Update And Lunch At Seymour Grille

After waiting all winter (we weren’t going anywhere anyway), the local diesel shop finally repaired the leaking seal on our coach engine and it is now hopefully good to go – the only problem is Bev refuses to go anywhere in it having totally lost confidence in the RV’s ability to reliably get us to our destination.  At this point, we have several repairs to make so we can put it on the market and which point we are likely to get out of RVing.

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Our Super Good Bangers and Mash For St. Patrick's Day

While I grew up believing the name Doolittle was English, my kids turned up a family crest suggesting it was Irish so I like to take no chances on St. Patrick’s Day and celebrate just in case I’m part Irish.  I know for sure I have a fair amount of Dutch and native American blood but who knows what else.  Maybe I should do one of the ancestry tests but for some reason I’m protective of my DNA – I promise that I have nothing sinister to hide 😊.

We invited Eliza to bring her family down for supper and considered the many options for the meal – Irish stew, corned beef, Shepherds pie, fish pie, bangers, etc.  After remembering the supply of great sausages I had in the freezer from The Wurst Kitchen, I settled on the following menu.

Before dinner drink – Pickle Back (not an Irish drink but it uses Jamison Irish Whiskey).  You shoot the whiskey then chaser with pickle juice - surprisingly not bad but it won't become my favorite - I'm not a whiskey guy.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

My Dad’s Favorite Meatloaf & My Restaurant

To My Irish Friends Out There

Bev had bought a large package of ground beef for me to make deconstructed cabbage rolls and decided that she wanted to make meatloaf from the rest of the meat.  Now I may not be the sharpest pencil in the box, but it didn’t take me long to realize that her announcement meant no cooking for me.  Bev had selected a different-from-our-normal recipe to try and I think it’s because it had the soffritto in it – she likes the veggies in her meatloaf.  The recipe for My Dad’s Favorite Meatloaf came from Simply Recipes.  I show the original recipe below, but I scaled up the one Bev used for our 2½ lbs of meat.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Deconstructed Skillet Stuffed Cabbage Rolls And A Very Small Rant

We really enjoy cabbage rolls, especially when someone else makes them, so when I saw Kevin’s recipe for Deconstructed Skillet Stuffed Cabbage Rolls  on his “Closet Cooking” blog, I knew I wanted to give it a try.  I’m going way out on a limb here to say I actually changed a Kevin recipe a little based upon some other recipes I saw – I added some bacon & sausage and changed the cooking order just a little.  The original recipe and his great how-to pics can be found by clicking on the above link.

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Simple and Delicious Pasta With Meat Sauce

I still try to use Sunday for pasta day but I didn’t feel like putting much effort into this meal so when I found a part full jar of Rao’s marinara and a package of burger in the fridge, a plan was born - Pam from “The Love Of Cooking” blog does this a lot on a much more sophisticated scale than me.  How about a simple meat sauce, me thinks, by simply combining my two finds with more Rao’s from the pantry (we try to keep it on hand but it’s obviously been discovered as it’s around twice the cost of most others).

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Hot Rods 50’s Diner

It’s been years since we visited Hot Rods in Alcoa, TN but since I had a 12:30 appt. in town and Bev wanted to visit Cindy at the rehab center, we decided to kill several bids with one stone including our meal out for the week and a stop for lawn lime at Rural King.  Hot Rods has a giant menu (eg - 80 kinds of burgers) and clicking on the link will take you to it.  It was a nasty weather day so I borrowed an outside pic from the web.