Tag Archives: eggs

The Green Room- Stillwater

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Hi Everyone!  I hope you had a good holiday weekend:)
Like I said earlier The Hubs and I spent some of the weekend in Stillwater, Minnesota.   It’s a smaller town that sits on the St. Croix river and is full of antique shops and beautiful older buildings.  We checked out a few antique stores until we couldn’t look at another old china set.  My favorite find was the signed photo below.  The icy blue eyes of a husky……. 30 rock? anyone?

For lunch we checked out The Green Room.  It claimed ‘Local Food and World Cuisine’ however, I didn’t see anything on the menu or the website that called out what farms or suppliers they sourced locally.  I was disappointed there wasn’t information on it since that was my main reason for picking it out but the food was pretty tasty.  We were served warm fresh bread with herb butter and I’d ordered the spaghetti carbonara.

The pasta had really good flavor with a rich and creamy sauce.  The egg was cooked just right with a runny yoke and the pepper gave it just the right amount of kick.  It was really filling so I didn’t quite finish it but I would definitely go back and have it again.   It also made me want to go home to figure out the perfect way to poach an egg!

I’ve got a bit of catching up to do from the weekend, I don’t remember the last time I went to the grocery store, but I’m going to try and squeeze in both the dessert and drink of the month yet this week…. or I might just end up doubling up in June.  Either way you win:)

Springtime Frittata

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Hi There.
So it’s safe to say I’m more than a day late on this post.  Sorry about that, work got away from me a little this week.  But as promised, here’s the frittata I was telling you about.  I used a recipe from Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks.  I was given her latest cookbook for Christmas this year and I’ve enjoyed every recipe I’ve tried so far.

Making a frittata was fairly easy and it’s a flexible recipe that allows you to use whatever veggies are in season. I used new potatoes, shallots, peas and my farmer’s market eggs.  One of the biggest things I liked about this recipe was that it allowed me to use up 10 of the 12 eggs!  I always run into having about half a dozen left over after baking something or just making an omelet.  They’ll sit there until i’m not sure when I bought them and then it’s just a waste of food.  No longer!

 

Making this did get me thinking about some of my kitchen supplies.  My skillet was a bit small and the straight sides made it difficult to run my spatula around the side to keep the edges from getting too brown.  My spatula is also permanently curled on the end from forcing it…. maybe I just created the perfect frittata spatula

Freezing Asparagus

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As I shared with you on Saturday, I made my first trip to the farmer’s market this weekend.  It was a damp, chilly day but there were a handful of booths open for business.

I picked up some morel mushrooms, asparagus and eggs to use with dinner throughout the week.  I’m excited to try the morel mushrooms but more on that later this week…  I bought a bit more asparagus than I normally would for a week (it’s not all pictured) because I’m determined to start freezing extra veggies this summer.  I put some thought into doing another CSA but I wanted to be able to better plan out what would be eating as well as be able to load up on things we liked rather than just getting one or two of something.  This way I’ll be able to stock our freezer and come winter, hopefully we’ll be able to enjoy a variety of summer vegetables that were all bought locally at the peak of their season.  Think of how great the taste of asparagus will be in November!

Freezing veggies is a fairly simple process called blanching.  To start off you’ll need to get a large pot of water to a rolling boil as well as another large pot, bowl or in my case a very well scrubbed out sink full of cold water and ice.  While I was waiting for the water to boil, I cleaned and trimmed down my asparagus to get rid of the woody ends.

Then once the water was boiling, in went the asparagus.  It’s best to do it in batches so your water stays nice and hot and you don’t loose your boil.  Leave the veggies cook in the water for about 1-2 minutes.  The idea is to get them started cooking but not close to done.  If you leave them in for too long you’ll end up with mush when you re-heat them later.

When the two minutes were up they went right into the ice water bath for another 1-2 minutes.  This stops the cooking process right away which is also important for avoiding mush later..

From there, I sorted out my batches in to even portions.  I went for roughly 2 servings per bag to make it really easy for grabbing for dinner later.  I ended up with 3 bags to throw in the freezer.  I know it doesn’t sound like much, but if I keep it up with a bit extra each week I think we’ll end up with a pretty full freezer before long. That being said, I should probably go clean out some of the freezer burned mystery meat;)

P.S.  I went back and re-made my asparagus with cream sauce for dinner that night too.  Here’s the original post for a refresher.