Weekend with Eileen

I am still trying to work this whole “blog thing” into my life by writing about certain aspects of my life on a regular basis. I’m not sure why. I don’t know if anyone is going to be interested in reading about what I am doing, cooking or reading. My plan is to thematically limit my blog posts to stories about food, primarily at our home on beautiful Bullet Pond and maybe an occasional book review. Four years ago, Joe decided it was time to expand the kitchen. It started out as an 8 foot expansion, but because we were going to need to put in a foundation no matter how large the addition, we decided to make the addition large enough to accommodate a two car garage downstairs and a master bedroom and bath upstairs. The final plan ended up doubling the size of the house. The new kitchen with its 3 sinks and enough counter space to allow for catering of parties became the new family room. We spend all of our time in the kitchen and we spend a lot of time cooking or simply preparing food and meals there.





We enjoyed many fun evenings with friends in the old kitchen too, but now it is easier. In the old kitchen my workspace consisted of a 21” x 15” butcher block cutting board. In the new kitchen I have 10x that space. Joe has his bread baking station and I, my salad and vegetable prep area. Then there is the sink that I wash dishes in and look out over the lake while doing so. It makes washing dishes a rather pleasant chore actually!

When I am at the house by myself or with a girl friend, we do not usually cook meat. We usually limit our meals to salads with “stuff”. I am not very good at cooking meat unless it is meatballs or meatloaf. Joe usually prepares the meat part of the meal. So, last weekend when I was at the house with my friend Eileen, we did not cook meat. We arrived at the house, after a couple of stops along the way, around 3:00pm. After a short break, we headed over to North Creek because we were looking for something that I thought they sold at Hudson River Trading but we were not successful. However, since we were in North Creek, we decided to eat and drink at barVino Friday night. You can never go wrong there.

On Saturday, after yoga and a walk, we came home to prepare lunch. I wanted to try a new egg salad that Molly Wizenberg wrote about on her blog site, Orangette. It sounded interesting because Molly made it sound interesting. I trusted her and wanted to try it. It was delicious. On our way home after our walk we stopped along the way to pick up the eggs. One of my egg "ladies" lives on the road up to the house. We actually met the hens and picked their eggs out of the hen house. We also met the new pigs, which are not so new and little anymore. The eggs were still warm when I put them in the pot to cook them. Talk about an egg salad with fresh eggs!!!! The salad consisted of the hard boiled eggs, sauted mushrooms and onions, mixed together with mayo and dill. Sounds weird, tastes great, and I will make it again. Molly also wrote a great book titled “A Homemade Life” which is really a compilation of her blog posts from a few years back. She is currently working on a new book and I am certainly looking forward to it.

Some weekends I like to try new recipes that I either read about or saw on TV. So, in addition to the egg salad recipe, I decided to try a cookie recipe I saw on FoodTV while at the gym during the week. The show, or chef, was Anne Burrell and the cookies were called Palmiers. You have seen these cookies at the bakery. Let me just say that I do not usually bake. This is probably attributed to the fact that I do not usually eat sweets. I would rather have a baked potato covered with sour cream and chives than a piece of cheesecake. (I would however stop traffic for a homemade piece of apple pie in season.) However, because we often have company for dinner, if I see a dessert that looks easy I will try it. These cookies turned out pretty good. I think if I do them again I would use less of the sugar mixture, but Eileen really liked them the way they were! Now if I could only find prepared puff pastry dough that is made without hydrogenated oil I would be all set.

For dinner we had a lovely bean and farro salad, lightly dressed with lemon and olive oil and tossed with parsley and chopped vidalia onion, alongside a salad of dressed arugula with blue cheese. A glass of wine and some baguette made for a delicious meal. We finished with espressos and some of those lovely Palmier cookies and went to bed very early!

It was a fun and relaxing weekend. I love weekends like that when I can just try some new recipes and not really worry about it not coming out. Eileen is a great friend to do this with, and, she and I enjoyed all of our meals last weekend.

Thanks for listening and I hope to report in with more food stories as the summer goes on.

Mary