I am not a food blogger. I think in order to be a food blogger, you also have to be a successful food photographer. It's enough for me to get the food prepared and served to my loved ones, I certainly don't have the time to stage an amazing food photo shoot. Every time I attempt to take a picture of something I made, I manage to capture glimmers of my disorganized, messy life in the corners of the picture, or I notice that my bake ware or serving dishes are old or unattractive. Basically, my food photos come out looking like my house: lived in. So, in lieu of showing you what I prepared for dinner tonight, I will tell you. Sorry, tech generation, this is a post you have to actually read rather than skim through the pictures before determining that you're not interested.
Tonight we fed my darling college son Luke, and his charming girlfriend and our favorite person Amber, as well as Luke's lovely parents. What's that you say? Your college son has real parents? Yes, it's true. I claim him as my own, but he belongs to another....and they are so wonderful. Luke's parents are British by birth, but citizens of the world through career. They have lived in England, of course, but also France, the States, and now China! Yes, they just made a tremendous move from Daphne, Alabama to Shanghai. And let me tell you, I've only been to one of those places, and I can tell you that the distance between those two places can be measured in more ways than one. Luke's father's work has taken him to all of these various and exotic places, and work has brought him back to the US for a meeting in NYC. So Mr. and Mrs. Jones decided to spend the week prior to the meeting visiting old friends in Alabama, including their dear son and daughter-in-dating. We had the pleasure of hosting the brood of four for supper tonight.
We were very excited, but always nervous about hosting new guests. Our house is always messy and small, the food can be dodgy at times, and the smaller inhabitants of the house make for a tricky visit.
I won't get into Jacks's behavior this evening. It has been raining for days, he has been cooped up in this house, and that's all I have to say about that.
So, I prepared the following:
Grilled Chicken Breasts with Lemon dijon marinade
Boiled Corn on the Cob
Caprese Salad
The Bread
Homemade Peach Ice Cream with Ginger Heart Cookies
And here's the best part, almost all of this meal was organic and/or local products. No, I'm not eschewing refined sugar at all times, and yes most of my food involves a lot of butter. But I managed to use some simple recipes and few ingredients to prepare this meal, and that is in keeping with what I'm trying to do with a lot of our meals lately. My shopping list today consisted of: tomatoes, chicken, lemons, ginger cookies, fresh mozerella, baguette (all bought at Earth Fare, with the exception of the tomatoes that I bought at Blooming Colors Market since I didn't feel like going around town in the rain and hounding my friends for fresh tomatoes from their gardens). I don't think that's a huge grocery list. I had everything else needed from an earlier trip to the farmer's market as well as some gifts from friends.
Let me give recipe credit where credit is due, I get a lot of my cooking ideas from The Pioneer Woman. I would like to think that I've made these ideas my own over time, but I'm pretty much a big rip off. So please don't think I'm a kitchen goddess. I'm a phony.
Here's the step by step instructions:
Chicken:
Toss cleaned and trimmed chicken breasts (boneless, skinless, free range organic) in a zip lock with the juice of a few lemons (organic), a large-ish squirt of grey poupon (or spoonful if you have the jar - we use it kind of often so I get those squeezy bottles), some honey (local - from our friend Mike, recent bee keeper and always bad ass), kosher salt, fresh ground pepper and olive oil. No, I didn't measure. I think you're supposed to marinate overnight, but I didn't go to the store until today, so I did it for about 5 or 6 hours.
Make your husband grill them for I don't know how long at I don't know what temperature, I don't work the grill.
Serve on a platter. YUM!
Corn:
Boil some water with some whole milk, a half a stick of butter, and about a cup of sugar. When it comes to a boil, throw in some cleaned up corn on the cob (I got these from my friend Paige who brought them to work this week in a large potato sack. Her new husband is an agriculture dude for Auburn. Sweet!). I'm not real good at cleaning up corn on the cob. I'm sure there were a few strings left in there, but I tried to ignore them. I do manage to crack each cob in half so I'm not serving each guest a giant ear of corn that they don't want. Or, if they do want it they can have two.
Let it boil about 10 minutes. Realize that dinner is not for a while. You meant to just get everything ready but you forgot yourself and went too far. So heat up the oven to warm so you can put these babies in a baking dish wrapped up in tin foil until dinner. Serve hot enough to melt some more butter on later. No one at dinner knows how much butter went into the boiling water earlier, so they'll probably want some more.
Caprese Salad:
Get some local tomatoes, and make sure you do that in the summer time. Local tomatoes only grow in the summer time. And those are the only tomatoes in the world that taste good at all. Plus I just read an article about tomato farms that use slave labor and grow crappy tomatoes. In Florida. Slaves. In Florida. The state that acquitted that girl of killing her sweet daughter. Discuss the crazy state in which I was born and the majority of my family lives now.....
Slice up those tomatoes kind of thick and lay on a platter overlapping each other like fanned deck of cards. Slice up some mozerella (organic - one of those that's shaped like a log. And those things are a pain because they're kind of messy. But worth it.). Stick slices of cheese in between your tomato slices so that now your deck of cards looks like alternating slices of tomatoes and cheese. Stick some fresh basil (grown on my deck, y'all - I grew something!!!) on top of each cheese slice. Drizzle with a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar, sprinkle with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper. (side bar - I attempted to make a balsamic vinegar reduction last week. I don't think it reduced and/or thickened properly, but that didn't stop me from keeping it in a jar in my fridge like I'm fancy or something - and proceeded to use it on this salad. I figured cold balsamic might be better? I don't know)
Serve this with style and panache and with a sterling silver tomato server. That's the most important part - the silver part. If you don't serve it with sterling silver it won't taste right. (that's sarcasm. you might not get that without pictures. Sorry.)
The Bread
This is a direct rip off of Pioneer Woman, but I don't care. It's made of heaven, and if this was her idea and only her idea, she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
Slice a baguette (organic) lengthwise. Slather with at least a stick of butter. I melt the butter and paint it on. Stick it on a foil lined pan in the oven at 350 for about 10 minutes. Then turn the oven to broil and let that bread almost burn. You have to use real butter or this won't work properly.
Cut it up in serving pieces with some kitchen shears. Enjoy listening to everyone hack at that buttery goodness with their chompers at dinner.
Dessert:
I have a Cuisinart Ice Cream maker that sits on my counter top all summer long. I move it to the basement during the winter to resist making ice cream everyday of the year, but it must be handy in the summertime.
I make a basic ice cream base:
1 cup whole milk (I still don't do organic milk all the time because of how often we have to buy milk - maybe that will improve when I go to a local couponing class in a few weeks)
3/4 cup sugar
almost but not quite 2 cups of cream (I don't accurately measure this - I mix this up in a 4 cup measuring pyrex cup, and I mix the sugar and the milk first to get the sugar dissolved. So when I add the cream I stop when the liquid reaches the 3 cup mark.)
Stir in a pinch of salt.
And that is what I start with. Then I flavor it as needed. Today I was making peach ice cream, so I chopped up some local peaches (well, Chilton County - just north of Montgomery, right?) and sprinkled them with some water and sugar, then let them sit in the fridge for a while (I think the technical term for this is macerate). After some time had passed, I drained out the peachy juices and added them to my ice cream base. Realistically, I should have cut down on the sugar in the base since I was adding this peach liquid, but it was too late when I thought of it.
Add a little vanilla. Then taste the whole thing, then add a little more vanilla because that stuff is so good.
Pour all this goodness in the ice cream maker and let it run. When it's ALMOST done, dump in the chopped peaches. Store in the freezer until time for dessert. Homemade ice cream is always better when it's been in the freezer for a while. I put it in a tupperware container with some plastic wrap directly on the ice cream, and the lid of the container on top of that.
Serve in little punch glasses with a ginger cookie or two. I found the MOST adorable heart shaped cookies, which also happen to be made without refined sugar and with wheat flour. It doesn't really matter because of all that straight up sugar in the ice cream, but I'm writing a pat myself on the back blog, so I need to include all the high points.
Keep a bowl of these little cookies on hand for anyone who wants to stuff handfuls in their mouth during dessert rather than delicately eating the two gently placed atop their scoop of ice cream.
And that is, in a whole bunch of words, the dinner I prepared tonight in step by step instructions. Now you can go make this and impress your friends and family. And feel better and more healthy with all the great food choices that went into this meal that tastes amazing!
