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

Iced Coffee with Coffee Ice

This is not my idea at all, but it's one I finally decided to try. When I want iced coffee, I usually just make coffee and chill it. With regular ice in it, I end up trying to drink it before the ice cubes melt though, so the coffee won't get too diluted. Enter coffee ice cubes.

They're really as easy as they sound. Just make coffee, pour into ice cube trays and freeze. We added some Bailey's flavored creamer too. After they were frozen, I put them into a freezer bag to keep them fresh. Today I decided to try one, and of course, since I was going to blog about it, I wanted pictures. I tried taking one of the glass with just the ice cubes in the living room with the laptop as the background, but I didn't like the way it looked. So I got up to take it to the kitchen, and I knocked over the glass with the coffee and it all went onto the carpet. Aaaahhhh! Help! Luckily, my fellas are used to this, and John sprang into action with paper towels. He even sacrificed one of his bathroom towels for the cause (it's in the washer now).

With the mess cleaned up, I made another cup of coffee and put it into a plastic cup to chill in the freezer. I wanted to keep my ice cubes on ice too. I was about to put the glass in the freezer too, but I decided I'd better switch them into a plastic cup too. That way, if I drop it later, it won't shatter. Follow my thinking here?

I think I'll get a festive ice cube tray now, like this one especially made for all the geeks out there.

Sometimes there needs to be chocolate

There are times we just need chocolate. Not like to have, but have to have chocolate moments.

I had one of those nights last week. And then there were brownies. I used to make a brownie recipe from one of my best go-to cookbooks, the Better Homes and Gardens red and white cookbook that everyone should have (more on that later). For 20 plus years, I have been using that recipe. It calls for melting chocolate in butter, adding sugar, vanilla, eggs and flour. But then I tried a recipe from Hershey's. I didn't have baking chocolate and needed brownies one day, so I used the Hershey recipe since it called for cocoa. Now I am hooked on this recipe. These brownies are just perfect. They have the perfect gooey texture, and I use Special Dark chocolate to make them even more decadent.

I used the Pioneer Woman's recipe for mocha frosting, though I cut it in half. I have used a dark roast recipe in this frosting, but this night we used a mocha flavored coffee and it really pushed it over the top.

These brownies were just what I needed. Gooey chocolate equals a happy Lisa.

One of my favorite cookbooks

We moved to North Carolina in 1993. We were so young, only out of college a few months. We hadn't even learned yet not to put everything we wanted on credit cards. We've come a long way since then, but this is one impulse purchase I am so glad we made.

This cookbook, called Southern Elegance, is a collection of recipes from the Junior League of Gaston County. I have no idea where we got it, because we live nowhere near Gaston County. Jeffrey thinks we bought it at a street fair, or maybe the Cotton Exchange in Wilmington.

One of the recipes is for Louisiana Barbequed Shrimp. This is not your typical barbecue. It's not even thick red sauce. Think lemons, Lots of lemons, And butter. Lots of butter. There's garlic, of course, and Worcestershire (Lea & Perrins) sauce and Tabasco, rosemary, salt and pepper. The sauce gets cooked briefly, and then gets poured over the shrimp still in their shells. The dish goes in the oven and very soon, there is delicious shrimp for everyone. This is one of our go to meals. We even entertain with this one. We put plenty of paper towels on the table along with bowls for shrimp shells. And we serve it with some crusty bread for sopping up the sauce. It makes a terrific mess but it is delicious!

You can tell we really like this recipe. Just look at the page.

This book is literally falling apart, but I will find some way to keep it. For some reason, this is also my go to book for a quiche recipe. Actually, I just look up the egg to milk proportion and make up the rest, but it's still where I look. I have a couple cookbooks like this one -- used and abused and messy.

Just like my kitchen.