Just grillin’

It is indicative of the kind of week it’s been that I found this post in my drafts folder, where it had been waiting since Sunday evening for me to upload photos. So, without further ado, but with photos, here ’tis.

Smoked pork butt, roasted new potatos and carrots, baked beans, tomatos. Yum.

I am pleased to report the grill has survived the move. It works.

I have, unfortunately, lost the wire brush with which it gets cleaned, which will necessitate a run to Lowe’s to replace. And I burned a couple of bucks worth of squash via forgetting about them over too-high heat on the grill. But dinner was most excellent, nevertheless.

Child C and I have also run, by my count, nine loads of laundry today. A load of mine, two loads of NS’s, two loads of towels, four loads of hers. And I have another load of towels left, including towels I do not recognize. If you and y’mama ‘n ‘em have lost any towels, come on over and look.

A breakfast to warm your heart and fuel you for the day.

Because it was going to be a busy day, I commenced with a good breakfast, with Child C, who had showed up on my doorstep about 10 a.m. with laundry. And, I hasten to add, I am happy to provide laundry amenities in order to get to spend a lazy Sunday with my baby girl.

 

Salad days

Combine Mennonite tomatos, buffalo mozzarella and the annual Lobster Boil, and you wind up with a couple of good salads for weekend brunches.

The caprese. Simplicity itself. And mighty tasty.

It’s hard to beat the standard caprese, particularly when you have good buffalo mozz and greenhouse-grown tomatos. My basil plant isn’t established enough that I felt comfortable snipping leaves, so I sufficed with basil oil and the freeze-dried stuff.

I’m astounded at how much better buffalo mozzarella is than the supermarket stuff. It still does not touch the fresh stuff I had at the store in the Italian Market in Philly, but it was pretty wonderful. I had stopped by the Culinary District to look for a top to my blender — new damn blender, and I somehow lost the little glass insert that goes in the plastic lid when I moved. They didn’t have one, but they had buffalo mozz, which they have not had since the end of tomato season last year, and I snarfed it up.

It was delectable. The simplicity lets the tomatoey taste shine through.

 

Caprese + lobster. What's not to love?

It was good enough, in fact, that I repeated it today, with the addition of some lobster meat I’d extracted from the two I brought home from the Blues Society lobsterfest yesterday. (As an aside, that’s a helluva lot of work for not much meat, but damn, it’s good; the remainder is chilling in the fridge in anticipation of going in a mornay sauce later this week.) I thought about hollandaise, or garlic aioli, but wound up with sriracha mayo and sweet chili sauce; it was most excellent.

Summery pasta, and technical difficulties surmounted

Pasta. Peas. Tomatos. Cheese. Poetry. I'm just sayin'.

The above photograph represents both a damn fine dinner and a triumph over technology, the latter of which is why I’m posting it at 6:30 in the freakin’ morning instead of last night when it was fresh on my mind.

My almost-new laptop told me it did not have enough quota to save the photos from my camera, but several hours of effing with it, along with a restless night’s sleep and renewed determination, fixed that. I got yo’ quota, right here, uh-huh.

But this pasta…these capreses….this is worth blogging at 6:30 in the freakin’ morning.

A celebration of spring

Suitable for eye-rolling gastronomic ecstasy, this is.

Have mercy.

I believe I may die. But if it’s tonight, I’ll go happy.

Have a friend visiting and sous-cheffing for me this weekend, so I’m taking advantage to cook some good stuff for a change. Tonight, it was a New York Strip, risotto primavera (ok, the peas were frozen and the carrots probably came from Mexico; deal with it), and caprese salads with the very first locally grown (in a greenhouse) vine-ripened tomato of the season.

And I repeat — have mercy!