Frittatas, Breakfast on the Go

To me frittata sounds like something that would be on the menu at The Country Club of Virginia, but then Emily over at the Daily Garnish explained the other day how to make the perfect fritatta it didn't look so complicated. I knew I had to try it. I've mentioned before that breakfast is my favorite meal of the day and has long been one of the few meals I rarely mess up. I love eggs in (almost) all forms and since I am not a huge fan of veggies I thought this would also be a good way for me to get some in the morning. I actually made these the night before so we could take them to work with us the next morning.

I followed Emily's general instructions but used the ingredients I had on hand:

• 6 eggs
• 1/4 cup light cream (we were out of milk)
• 1/4 cup diced white onion
• 1 cup sliced baby portabella mushrooms
• 1 tsp. minced garlic
• 1/2 cup diced tomato
• 2 tsps. dried basil
• salt & pepper

I started by sauteing the onions and mushrooms together to soften them up. Ty SAYS he doesn't like onions (half the time he doesn't know he's eating them hehe) so I wanted them to be cooked down as much as possible. 

I was really nervous about using the light cream in the eggs instead of milk but went ahead and mixed them together. I really want to learn how to crack an egg with one hand, I'm sure there is a tutorial out there somewhere for that...yeah, look here. Ty is going to crack up when he walks in the kitchen and sees me doing that golf ball/quarter thing! 

Anyway, the onions and mushrooms took 10-15 minutes and it was time to pour on the eggs. I'd debated my choice on pan for an unnecessarily long time before I started this. The instructions say you need to put the pan in the oven to finish the frittata so I was going to go with a metal handled pan....but that pan isn't non-stick and visions of scraping ruined frittata out of it won out. I went with the non-stick pan even though I was 75% sure the handle was not oven safe. Just one of the many reasons I hope you take my cooking "tips" with a grain of salt...

So before you start thinking I'm a total moron, I did have a plan for this whole "let's not melt the pan handle in the oven" thing. Emily also said to leave the oven door open when you broil things so they don't overheat, so I figured I'd just let the handle stick out the oven a bit! I'm not winning any genius points over here but you gotta work with what you got.

Back to the frittata. I poured the eggs in and then sprinkled the tomatoes and seasonings on top. Once the edges firmed up my oven experiment was underway.

And it worked out fine thank you very much :)

The Verdict: Not too shabby! I don't know that the cream was really needed, but I let the frittata pie slices cool a bit and put them in tupperware for us to grab in the morning. One slice with some fruit was plenty for me the next morning!

Yoga al Fresco and Wedding Update #2!

This morning I met Brittany for my first ever outdoor yoga class! It was organized by the folks at Lululemon (I've never shopped there though I hear they have cute stuff, I also hear they are not in my budget) organized the class at Maymont and brought together yoga instructors from around the city.

On the way I picked up an iced latte mmmm.

And when I got there I happened to run into two other friends who had staked out the perfect shady spot so we joined them. At the end they said about 230 people were there!

I didn't get any action shots, but the weather was perfect and I really enjoyed doing yoga out in the fresh air!

Wedding Update :)

Here is wedding update #1 if you're interested!

So we finally got to go down and spend some time in Ocracoke doing wedding stuff last weekend! My parents came with us for the trip, I think my mom has been feeling left out since we didn't do the big wedding dress shopping trip and I found my bridesmaids dresses online...I've mentioned before, this whole wedding thing is not my cup of tea so I've been doing most of it very low key from my computer, asking Ty for his opinions on most things and then just doing it. Once we came to terms with the fact that weddings are crazy overpriced and most things we thought we wanted, we can't afford, the process became much easier.

Boarding the ferry to Ocracoke

First things first, after a 6 hour drive we needed food and a drink(s). We went to the Back Porch restaurant Friday to check it out for potential rehearsal diner/reception catering. Food was great, wine was great, restaurant is super cute - 90% of the place is literally a giant screened in back porch! We think they would do fabulous for the dinner or the reception or both.

Saturday morning my parents got up and did some surf fishing while Ty and I met with our minister! She is awesome. We read through the ceremony script, got a little teary eyed, played a version of the Newlywed Game, a few more tears, and after all those happy emotions we met back up with my parents for a drink at one of the restaurants on the harbor :)

Then it was on to The Castle. We finally got to see in person where the ceremony and reception will take place and meet our wedding planner! It is literally 50 feet from where we stayed when we got engaged and the pier Ty proposed on is going to be right behind us during the ceremony. It's actually a bigger area than we thought which is good.

The house on the right is where we'll stay and also where I'll get ready that day. There was some talk of having the reception over in the same area as the ceremony, we just have to see about the tent and if it will all fit over there. Either way we loved it!

On top of The Castle

After touring The Castle we went and met with the florist. One thing about getting married somewhere remote is that your choices are sort of limited as far as vendors, which is fine by me because that means less descisions I have to make! I showed her some ideas I'd found and told her I'm not as concerned with the types of flowers, just the general colors we're looking for (darker purples and pinks). We're keeping the flowers as simple as possible, I would rather put more money towards the food and wine/beer to be honest. Plus we're getting married outside, it's already beautiful!

We went to dinner at the Flying Melon which everyone has raved over as the best caterer on the island. We weren't blown away by the food but if the rumors are true that they can do a shrimp boil or something neat like that we'll probably go with them for the reception. After that we decided to check out Howard's Pub (which I forgot to mention we'd already gotten a drink at early in the day...). All I know is, they pour some strong drinks at HP.

This was the bar, I sent this to my sister b/c it made me think of Harry Potter :)

The tequila shots probably weren't a bright idea considering we were meeting with the cake baker at 9am the next morning...So yeah, the cake meeting was rough. But she was awesome as well and knew exactly what kind of cake we wanted after I showed her a few pictures. It'll be 3-tiered vanilla butter cake with vanilla buttercream (Ty likes his cakes plain), she called the icing "plaster style" and she'll decorate them with the same flowers we use for the bouquets.

(Thanks to Heather for the cake inspiration!)

It feels so nice to have most of the big things out of the way! We also ordered our invitations this week and I found my shoes...and talk about keeping the budget low, we've been using VistaPrint.com for all of our printing so far and have spent only about $110 on save the dates, invitations and mailing labels combined! They have some really cute ones, you can actually do a fair amount of customizing to them and I've been very impressed with the quality we've gotten. Again, more money for wine & beer :)

Hope you had a great weekend!

What is Quinoa??

I read a lot of healthy living and food blogs and I'll be the first to admit, a lot of times I have no idea what it is they're eating. Chia seeds? Nutritional yeast? Quinoa? Yeah, I got nothing. I wouldn't have the slightest idea where to find those things in a grocery store.

I was searching around on Google (a favorite past-time of mine) the other day for non-meat sources of protein and was surprised that quinoa (pronounced kee-no-wa, thank you Brittany for that clarification) kept coming up. I'd assumed it was some other random type of pasta like orzo or maybe a type of rice but I was wrong - go figure! It's actually a type of grain and now it makes more sense why I see it on a lot of blogs I know are written by vegetarians, it has about 14 grams of protein per serving. Not too shabby for a grain! I figured if I could find it in the store, I'd give it a shot.

And there it was. In the health food section, which isn't really that big so I didn't even have to search that hard.

Ever tried cooking and taking pictures with 3 cats in the house?

Always trying to get in my shots. We keep them off the counters as much as possible but they'll sneak up on you every once in a while, especially when food is involved.

We went to the farmer's market last weekend and had all kinds of fresh produce laying around so after reading through a couple of recipes (like this one on Brittany's blog, which is full of great vegetarian recipes if you're interested!) I thought we'd try a cold quinoa salad with as much stuff in it as I could fit.

Summer Quinoa salad

• 1 cup quinoa
• 2 cups chicken stock (or vegetable stock if you want to keep it vegetarian)
• 1/2 cucumber diced
• 1/2 tomato diced
• 1/2 yellow pepper diced (or red or green, whatever you have)
• 1/4-1/2 red onion diced

I followed the directions on the box of quinoa which said to combine the grain and the stock (or water if you don't have stock, I just wanted to add a little more flavor), bring it to a boil then simmer for 10 minutes until the liquid is absorbed. I assumed like some of the other tiny things I've cooked (orzo, risotto) that these little grains were going grow and to avoid an overflowing pot I went with a bigger one to start. Not necessary! These actually stay about the same size. I also have a hard time with the whole "simmer" thing on our gas stove, and yes I do have the flame on low...so when it starts to boil I just take the pot off the burner for a minute or so and put it back on. It's like a little workout :)

While that was cooking and then cooling, I got to dicing everything else and contemplating seasonings.

Not using Garlic Gold isn't really an option these days so of course that was going in, but I remembered we picked up a tube of fresh grated ginger from the produce section of the grocery store the other day on a whim. I think ginger is used in a lot of Asian cooking right? Well that's what I went with anyway. You could season this a million different ways I think.

Spices:

• Garlic Gold nuggets
• ground fresh ginger
• basil
• lemon pepper

I let the quinoa cool for a bit and then tossed in the veggies and seasonings.

The Verdict: I was so surprised when Ty took a bite of this and loved it! I was convinced he wouldn't like the texture. He did not like cous cous the one time I made it and this is sort of like big cous cous texture-wise. I think I went a little heavy on the red onion, but since I'm a horrible dicer they were really easy to pick out. This also made pretty good leftovers for lunch the next day!

Do you read other blogs where they make foods that make you think, what the heck is that?

Beer Bread Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Remember when I mentioned the yummy meal I had planned for that beer bread? Well the weekend got away from me (the bachlorette party I went to Friday night may have had a hand in this) and I didn't get to execute my entire plan but we did get to try the main part: grilled cheese sandwiches! I'd wanted to make homemade tomato soup to go with it, I just never found the time and then we got hungry.

You usually can't go wrong with a grilled cheese sandwich, it only requires two ingredients: cheese and bread. I looked in our fridge and found white cheddar and asiago cheeses which sounded very gourmet to me. I really wanted to use cream cheese too but we didn't have any. There is a sandwich shop in Charleston, SC (shout it out if you know the name, I can't remember!) that is known for their tomato and cheese sandwiches. There are 3-4 cheeses on it and I know for a fact one of them is cream cheese, which might sound weird but is actually all sorts of awesome. I think another is muenster maybe? This unnamed sandwich shop also inspired me to slice up one of the tomatoes we got from the produce stand and add it on.

If there is one thing I learned from my mom about making hot sandwiches, always put a little butter on the outside slices.

I was trying to be resourceful since we don't have one of those panini press things so I did this:

And then this happened:

Damn gas stove. I really didn't think they were on there that long! I tried scraping some of the burnt part off with not much luck, instead I paid more attention to the other side and served them burnt side down...that actually works on most occasions.

The Verdict: The beer bread made a HUGE difference in the flavor! It helped that we had super ripe tomatoes too. Those two things with the strong flavored cheeses helped cover up the burnt part.

What do you usually do when you burn something you're cooking? Depending on how bad it is I usually try to find a way to cover it up :) but most of the time I'm not going to lie, I cry. And then order pizza.

Beer Bread

I have a really yummy meal planned for tomorrow night that I thought of when I saw we had a box of beer bread mix in our cabinet. I went ahead and made the bread tonight because it takes 50 minutes to bake and I know we’re not going to want to wait on it tomorrow night.
I’m not a beer drinker so I wasn’t really sure what kind of beer would be best for this. All you have to do is dump a bottle of beer in a bowl with the bread mix and stir it up, easy enough. My beer choices included Dos Equis, Red Stripe, an IPA, a couple types of Sam Adams and this Longboard lager.

I’ll be honest, I picked this beer like I pick my wine, it had the prettiest label :)
The box gives you a couple of variations and add-ins for your bread like seasonings and parmesan cheese. You’ll never guess what I decided to put in ours…

Yeah, I’m obsessed, it’s cool.
Everything got mixed together in a bowl and then went into a loaf pan. The instructions said pouring 3 tablespoons of melted butter on top of the bread was optional. In my world butter is not an option. But I did use more like 2 tablespoons, 3 seemed like a little much.

375 for 50-55 minutes. While that was happening, this was happening:

I also spent some time Googling beer bread recipes (and played with the Google guitar…anyone else spend too much time playing with that today??). Assuming we like this one, I’d love to try to make it from scratch at some point. Here are a couple versions I found:
Beer Bread on Food.com
Beer Bread on AllRecipes.com
Beer Bread on FoodNetwork.com
At first I was thinking that because the second two recipes call for self-rising flour which I’ve never used I’d probably try the first recipe. Then I read this on Wikipedia:

Beer bread is a simple bread based on the idea that both beer and bread have a common creation process: yeast is used to turn sugar into alcohol, which in the case of bread then boils off.
Beer bread can be simply made with flour, beer, and sugar. However, it will be fairly dense and heavy unless an additional leavening agent, e.g. baking soda or yeast and sugar, is added. Self-rising flour may be used because it is a mixture of flour and leavening agent. Beer bread without a leavening agent is very sturdy and tends not to lose moisture if it is overcooked. The only consequence of overcooking tends to be a thicker crust.

So I guess there is a reason so many recipes that use self rising flour! Still, I’m not a fan of buying ingredients that I won’t use in other recipes so I’ll still try the first recipe.
By this time our house smells AMAZING and the bread is finally done.

It looked and smelled so good I couldn’t help but test it out.


The Verdict: YUM. It is pretty dense but I’m learning that pretty much all homemade bread (or all MY homemade bread) is a lot more dense than store bought bread. It’s sweeter than I was expecting. I’m excited to try it with dinner tomorrow night!
Have you ever tried making beer bread or another quick bread?

Going Home

You know that place where no matter how long you’ve been away, when you go back it’s like you never left? For me that place is Hollins University and this weekend was our 5 year reunion. We stayed in the dorms (with no AC!). We drank wine. And champagne. And vodka. We laughed until it hurt. In two days we tried to relive 4 of the most amazing years of my life.
The drive that usually takes me 3 hours from Richmond to Roanoke took almost 5 hours due to a tractor trailer accident that shut down both lanes of 81 South. Sitting in dead stopped traffic for an hour and a half when you know you are only 30 minutes away from your favorite people on the planet is EXCRUCIATING. I finally made the not so smart decision to drive my Jetta through the pretty deep median and turn around to take an alternate route. I made it fine but there was a very close call with a tractor trailer that had me needing a drink in a bad way when I finally made it to Hollins.

Luckily my friends always have my back, there was sangria waiting for me in the parking lot :)

And the great reminder of our crazy traditions was there to greet me as well.

Only seniors (or alumnae in our case) are allowed to paint the rock, it sits right near the entrance to campus.
After I recovered from my drive, we got down to the business of pretending we were 21 again.

We enjoyed our beautiful campus.

Had a parade of classes on Saturday morning. These ladies were celebrating their 50th reunion!

Some of Class of 2006 :)

My graduating class was actually 1/2 the size of my high school graduating class! Not everyone is cut out for a small women’s college but those of us who did it know we wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was an awesome weekend, heading back home was tough after being reminded of how carefree life was back then. I’d go back to the days where my biggest worry of the week was Professor Fleck’s econ problem sets any day!

It was great to see everyone and to catch up with the people I hadn’t seen since our 2 year reunion. Many of them are married, a few have kids already, 3 of us in the picture above are getting married in the next few months! It’s funny how things can change in 5 years but even funnier that some things will always feel the same.

Steak with Mushroom Cream Sauce

I was watching the Food Network over the weekend and Rachel Ray was making something I thought Ty and I would LOVE. It was a pepper crusted steak with mushroom cream sauce and roasted asparagus mmmm. We will eat mushrooms on just about anything but I have had really bad luck with sauces in the past. I can never seem to get them to thicken up the way they are supposed to. And I’ve never tried to make a cream sauce so that added to my nervousness.

We ended up not going with the pepper crust on the steaks, mostly because we were starving and didn’t want any other steps standing between us and dinner. We weren’t really in the mood for asparagus either so we went with green beans and roasted potatoes. I bought the really cute little potatoes but still knew they’d take much longer to cook than anything else so I got them ready first.

I quartered them, threw them in a bowl and tossed them with garlic olive oil, the last (gasp!) of my Garlic Gold Italian Seasoning mix, salt and pepper then popped them in the oven at 400. I set the timer so I could finally figure out how long these take to make. I started with 15 minutes then added 5 minutes at a time until they were golden. In all it took about 25 minutes – and these were pretty small pieces.
Ty got the steaks on the grill while I started on the sauce. It began easy enough, melt 2 tablespoons of butter and add in the mushrooms.

We used baby portabellas because they were on sale. I’m finally catching on to the fact that mushrooms shrink up a lot when you cook them so I went ahead and used the whole container. They sautéed in the butter for about 5 minutes while I was contemplating my next move. The recipe calls for cognac or brandy, neither of which we have. After some Googling for potential substitutes – we had whiskey, vodka, tequila and of course wine – I decided the safest bet was to go with something non-alcoholic. I used 1/4 cup of chicken stock in place of 1/4 cup cognac, I was afraid the other alcohols would taste weird with the cream.
That simmered and actually reduced in about 4 minutes! I was so excited I almost forgot I wasn’t done yet :) I added in the cream and while that reduced a little I sautéed the fresh green beans in the last (double gasp!) of my garlic olive oil and toasted sesame oil. I’m a big fan of the toasted sesame oil. Note to self: don’t throw fresh green beans in a pan that’s too hot. Those little oil splatters hurt!

Everything timed up pretty nicely and the sauce even thickened up like it was supposed to!

The Verdict: The potatoes and green beans were awesome (meaning not burnt), Ty did a great job cooking the steak and while at first bite we really liked the mushrooms cream sauce, bites 4 and 5 weren’t as exciting. The creaminess was a little overpowering, maybe the alcohol helps cut through some of that? It was just too heavy for me so I didn’t finish most of mine.

Any suggestions on another type of sauce that goes great with steak?