Fall vegetables?

Tomatoes and bell peppers are a summer thing, right? Not at our house.

We had some really nice herb plants this year -- Rosemary, chives, thyme and parsley (no, no sage). And we had some container tomatoes and bell peppers. I wasn't sure how they would do in containers, but the plants really flourished. At least the pepper plants did. The tomato plants did great until the squirrels discovered them. They took one whole plant from the pot. And then they took all the tomatoes. And finally, they denuded it so all that was left was a sad looking stem. Sigh. 

The peppers were still in the game though. And the herbs too. Then we went to Asheville and were gone for 5 days in the hottest, driest part of summer. The peppers we had on the stems - dead. The herbs? Completely dried up and dead. But the pepper plants still looked good. And the tomato stem, well, it was still green-ish. So I kept watering them. And now this happened. There are flowers on the tomato plant. I mean, look at that stem! It was sheared in half, and still this thing is growing. And we might get tomatoes after all. We might need to invest in some fine mesh screening to surround it and protect it from the squirrels. There are also nine bell peppers growing. Nine! I have always thought that our yard has some kind of weird growing vibe and that plants flourish despite my care for them, and now I think I have proof. Let's just hope they give us some veggies before our fall trip. 

Fig jam and pork

A friend recently gave me a jar of fig jam. I knew I liked figs, but I wasn't sure about the fellas. Turns out one does and one is not sure.

I also wasn't entirely sure what to do with fig jam. It has all the typical fruit jam uses, and I hear it is really good on toast. But it seems to be more...substantial than a berry or apple jelly or jam. So I decided to make a sauce for pork chops.

Now look. I know this is a food blog. But I am terrible about writing measurements down. And I only got one picture of the final product. And the boy photobombed it. But I am a writer, so I can tell you all about it. Here's how it went down.

I sauteed boneless pork chops in the cast iron skillet. I seasoned the chops with salt and pepper and paprika. You could use your favorite grill seasoning or garlic instead.

After the chops were done, I removed them and kept them warm. Then I started with some olive oil and onions. I used a red onion, sliced in thin half moons. A little salt and pepper and then let them get happy, as Emeril would say. You want them pretty soft, nice and caramelized. Deglaze with white wine. Then add some apples, thinly sliced. I used 2 Granny Smith apples, and I didn't bother to peel them. I added a little dry thyme at this point. A little more wine to keep things moving in the pan.  

Next came the fig jam. I heated it through and then added a little more wine to thin out the sauce a little. I tasted the sauce and didn't think it needed anything else. Except a little butter. Sauce always needs a little butter.

Plate the chops, spoon the onions and apples on top, add a little more sauce. Baby carrots with a just a little butter, salt and pepper made a nice side dish and voila! Dinner was served. Oh, I almost forgot the biscuits. Jeffrey had mentioned a couple of times that he was really hungry. And I had made him help clean out my car, so I made biscuits. No muss, no fuss, just the Hungry Jack recipe here. No cheddar, so I used mozzarella and garlic seasoning instead.

John is not necessarily a fan of the fig jam I think, but otherwise, this dinner was a big hit!

I just want some S and P

We Americans will accessorize anything. Need some new kitchen towels? There's probably a different color and theme for any possible decorating style you can imagine. The same goes for plates, and utensils.

And boy is it true for salt and pepper shakers. A friend of mine who is certified as a nutritionist made me switch to Pink Himalayan salt. I did, and I'm fine with that choice. Still tastes good, and if it will be better for me than regular salt, great. My only objection is that I use a grinder, and it's hot over a pot of boiling water! So I thought I would look for a salt box, and get some already ground pink salt that I can use for just such an occasion. Today, I was surfing through Wayfair, and decided to look there. Side note - this blog is not a criticism of Wayfair - I have found some really good deals there and this same phenomenon is probably universal. 

There were 1,125 hits for salt and pepper shaker. I looked, because I was curious. Of the 1,125 to choose from, 31 of them were in the 'greater than' $125 price category. Seriously? Who needs a Waterford crystal salt and pepper shaker set? 

We actually have a few sets ourselves. One set belonged to one of my Grandmothers, so while I have no idea if they're antique or valuable, I am glad to have them. And one set was a very cool gift from some friends. It is a house and the witch's legs from 'The Wizard of Oz.' That set is also sentimental, as our family worked on a local production of that show several years ago. 

After looking around Wayfair for a while, I got the idea for this blog, and now I will still have to do the 'ow, that's hot' dance when I salt boiling water to make pasta or rice.  

The weather outside is frightful, but at least there's oatmeal cremepies

When foul weather looms, people gather supplies, and food is often at the top of the list. In Pennsylvania, where I grew up, bread and milk were the top two staples when a snowstorm was on the horizon. But here in Hurricane Alley, we skip the milk -- the last thing we want to do is pack the fridge with more perishables when we might lose power. We do go for the bread though. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are always comforting.

My family has its own traditions when it comes to stocking up for tropical wether. I think it was in 1999 when we first had Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies during a hurricane. I was pregnant, very pregnant, and close to my due date. So when Hurricane Floyd was bearing down on the NC coast, we decided to stay with friends in Wilmington (NC) to be closer to the hospital. No one wants to be stuck on an island, in labor, during a storm, after all. Of course we pooled resources to prepare. They had young children, so they were probably the ones who bought the oatmeal creme pies. We were there for what seemed like weeks as the storm slowly made its way through the area. Really, it was just overnight. I don't even remember why the oatmeal creme pies became a "thing," but they did. It was our inside joke from the whole experience. And to this day, this chewy, sweet snack food is still on our list of needed items when preparing for a storm.

This weekend was no exception. Tropical Storm Hermine was passing by, due to be gone by Saturday morning. Of course we all worked on Friday. Though school was released early, the boy was called in to work a couple of hours late that afternoon. And being the excellent child he is, he brought home the oatmeal creme pies as directed, the large back-to-school pack even. 

Fortunately, Hermine was only a Tropical Storm, but we were fully prepared in any case.   

The most amazing burritos

We're headed out to the big city (Wilmington, NC) for a little last minute school supply shopping tonight. Our son needs just a couple things -- a couple new binders and some pens. Otherwise we're ready. These are certainly things we could get without driving to the big city. But Jeffrey asked if we had any reason to go to Wilmington this weekend. He specifically suggested that we might need to go shopping (I know, right?). Then the real reason came out. He was craving some Flaming Amy's.

This little gem of a restaurant serves the most amazing burritos. They're huge. And you need to expand your definition of burrito to truly understand their menu. They have a cheeseburger burrito, one with tuna, one with shrimp....you get the idea. They also have build-your-own quesadillas, which is my go-to choice. I like chicken, roasted red peppers, corn, feta, any of the above or whatever else looks good to me that day. The burritos and quesadillas are amazing, but then there's the salsa bar and their homemade chips for dipping. There's traditional salsa of course, and there's pineapple jalapeno. My personal favorite is the ginger peach.

The restaurant's decor is as eclectic as its menu. There's a velvet Elvis, a flock of flamingoes overlooking the main dining area, and a score of similar decorations. There's a special discount one night for displaying your tat, but the place is also frequented by professors from the local college, soccer moms and everyone in between. It's just good food, with a good atmosphere. The slogan is Hot, Fast, Cheap and Easy, and they don't disappoint.

So we'll drive an hour to get those last minute school supplies (school starts Monday after all), because Jeffrey wants a burrito :-)

It's my onion, and I'll cry if I want to

I cut two whole onions today. And boy did it make me cry.

I was making sauce, or gravy as a lot of Italian-Americans from the Northeast call it. I was making a lot of sauce. See, I don't know how to make just a few meatballs. And I decided to make a few extra for giving away to some friends who are going through some tough illnesses. Naturally, that meant a double batch of sauce too. And it starts with onions.

It seems like a lifetime ago that I managed a Subway franchise. One of our prep tasks was cutting onions. We had this old, but extremely handy slicer with a handle that rolled a blade and then voila! Sliced onions. We would slice them pounds at a time, since we went through a lot in the course of the day. Especially at the Wrightsville Beach store on a Saturday in the summertime. I could always tell when the drawbridge went up, even though we weren't close enough to see it. We'd have a couple of customers and then all of a sudden, the line was out the door. Yep. Bridge was up.

Anyway, employees were always coming up with ways to avoid the crying. We'd walk into the freezer to calm the crying down (that did actually work, but it didn't prevent the crying in the first place). We'd try running them under cold water first, chilling them first. Nothing worked. Maybe it was just the sheer volume of onions we had to cut that made these methods ineffective. One of my college girls had a great idea though. She was a surfer and a competitive swimmer. She brought in her swimming goggles and volunteered to cut all of our onions for the day because she could handle it from behind her frog eyes. We loved it and she was a hero for a while.

I'll never forget this one time when I was working by myself. I was cutting the onions and just crying my eyes out. A customer came in. I went up to the front and washed my hands and asked him what I could get for him. He told me but looked a little wary. I started asking him what he wanted on his sandwich, but I was still red-eyed and sniffy and he still looked very uncomfortable. Laughing, I assured him that everything was fine and that I was just prepping onions. He gave a big sigh of relief and finished his order.

So, back to tonight. I took a quick break and went out onto the back porch to get away from the onions. Jeff immediately looked up and asked me what was wrong. Oh the things we do for the love of a good meal :-)

Kitchen Labels via Sharpie

Some people use their computers to create and print fancy labels for their kitchen containers. Not us. No way. Give us a Sharpie and we'll just write on the side of the Tupperware.

We actually have two such Stites family masterpieces. The first one, pictured here,

is powdered sugar. You may have figured out that part. It says some form of "powdered sugar" or "not flour" on all four sides of the container. Because, well, some of us can use a little reinforcement. Jeffrey Stites is a really good cook. He's not afraid to try anything in the kitchen and has conquered things like coq au vin and homemade Cuban bread (is it still Cuban if it's made in North Carolina by an American of European descent?). But he has also made French Onion soup using powdered sugar instead of flour to make a roux. Twice. Twice he did this. The first time we chalked it up to being an honest mistake. But the second time? We don't even keep these two things anywhere near each other in the cabinets. We really laughed at him the second time. Since I wanted to make sure that never happened again, I took a Sharpie to the plastic and voila! There should be no more mistaking those two in this house.

The second container also has a story. We were working on Brunswick Little Theatre's summer musical a couple years ago. We were doing "Into The Woods," and the plan was for a teenaged boy to carry a cow to portray Milky White. We needed flour to make the cow white. It was a brown cow that needed a light dusting to make it stand in for the white cow and...well, go see the show live if you can find it playing on stage anywhere and otherwise, rent the movie. Anyway, we needed to keep a supply of flour backstage. Being the ever -resourceful stage manager that he is, Jeffrey borrowed our flour container and labeled it "Instant Milky White."

Surprisingly, those are the only two we have felt the need to label so far. Knowing us though, they won't be the last.

Noodle-ing around in the kitchen

Get your mind out of the gutter - this is a family blog. 

I made homemade noodles! I feel so much more Italian now. 

Jeffrey and John got me a pasta roller kit for the KitchenAid stand mixer for Christmas. They also got me a pasta cookbook (more on that later) and some cool little tools – a pasta cutter and a ravioli form/cutter. The pasta cutter for the mixer is a separate attachment, and I am undecided if we’ll even need that. My favorite noodles can be made without it, I think.

We tried it out recently, settling on the basic pasta recipe in the book that came with the mixer attachment. We’ll save fancy pasta recipes for when we have a little more skill.

What are you doing? Can I have some?

I was a little unsure how this would all go. When my Mom was a newlywed, her mother-in-law, my Grandmother Pasquarello, taught her how to make homemade pasta. Grandmother Pasquarello was not actually Italian, but she had married into an Italian family so of course she had to learn to make sauce, pasta, hot sausages, etc. My Mom only did this that one time because she said she used every pot in the house. Twice. They didn’t have the spiffy equipment that I do now, and I have never been afraid of making a mess in the kitchen. I mean, I can make a mess boiling eggs (oh, yeah, I have a story about boiling eggs I’ll need to share sometime too).

Running through the pasta roller

All of us worked on this dinner. Jeff got started on the chicken. It’s sort of our version of Chicken Milanese, breaded and sautéed with, well, let Jeffrey tell you.

Well, it was kind of a feel your way as you go along thing. Plus, I was trying to keep busy while Lisa and John rolled and cut noodles. The chicken is simply breaded with the usual milk, flour, seasoned breadcrumb assembly line then fried up in some canola oil until it’s nice and golden brown. I didn’t worry about cooking the chicken through as I knew I had time to finish it in the oven, which I did end up doing. When this is done, you’re left with a nice bit of chicken-flavored oil. I deglazed with a bit of white wine, then put a little olive oil in to allow for more sauce and sprinkled flour onto it (while it’s nice and hot) to make a light roux. Then in went the juice of two lemons. It’s really just a matter of watching to keep the sauce the consistency you like, adding a bit of wine or oil (or lemon juice if you have any, but I didn’t) to loosen things up or letting it cook down to thicken. I fiddled longer than need be but I think it may have helped in the long run as I kept adding wine and cooking it down again. The sauce ended up pretty rich and, if I do say so myself, delicious.

Not too much of a mess...

It was delicious. I had made the pasta dough and let it chill and then John and I fired up the pasta roller. We had some successes and some not-so-great attempts. And I think next time I would run it though the next setting to make the pasta a little thinner. I figured out that if it didn’t come our pretty, I could just fold it in half lengthwise, run it through the roller again and it would be ok. As we made sheets, I cut out fettucine noodles. I coiled them up as best I could, and kept a towel over them until they were all finished so they wouldn’t get dry. Then we boiled them in salted water. We put a little butter and parsley on them, and voila! Dinner. The best part is that we were all in the kitchen together. And I have to mention that John was photographer for this post. I think he did a great job!

I think next I will try ravioli J