Introduction post

Hey everybody! This is the super fun food blog that still needs a good name. I'm going to keep this introduction at the top for a while, until things get rolling. New content will appear below. So! Some things:

• The idea for this blog is to be able to talk about food as much as we want without annoying people on Facebook. We can share recipes, link to recipes on other sites, talk about what we cooked or what we ate or where we ate, give restaurant or food reviews, talk about kitchen gadgets and cooking techniques, and post lots of pictures. I totally want to know what all of you ate for dinner last night. Also, I love pictures of the inside of people’s fridges and pantries. I don’t know why.
• We need a name! Please suggest an awesome name, because I’m drawing a blank. Our web address is taken from a Benjamin Franklin quote that I found about food. We can use that for the title if you want to.
• If anybody has a better idea for a theme, or wants to tweak the theme we have, let me know and I’ll promote you to admin. Or if you just want to have admin permissions for any other reason, let me know, and I’ll promote you.
• There are no rules here except that we should only post about food and food-related stuff, and please keep everything HAES-friendly and don’t use food- or body-judgy words ("bad" foods and “good" foods, etc). 
• Please invite anybody you want to contribute to this blog. They don’t have to be mutual friends, they just have to not be jerks.

Okay, that’s about it! Let's all start talking about stuff!

Pork with Honey-Cream Sauce

One of the many things I love about travel is the opportunity to try new foods. We usually avoid chain restaurants and instead look for popular local haunts for a culinary adventure. We are seldom disappointed. In fact, there are times when a dish is so wonderful that I simply must try to re-create it at home. Such was the case regarding our most recent trip to France. 

While visiting our daughter, who is a student, my husband and I often dine at the places she and her spouse are familiar with. They are tried-and-true cafes and restaurants that they both know we will love. Many times, they are inexpensive places which are frequented by students who have little disposable income. Often, the places we choose are not typically French, but instead are ethnic restaurants where the food is usually less expensive. 

One evening, we decided to splurge on a French restaurant. It was not terribly pricey, but was definitely not "student" food. We had a wonderful time at that charming little restaurant, and were served a memorable meal of pork filet served in a delightful honey-cream sauce. It was so memorable, in fact, that I could not stop thinking about it. Months later, I attempted to duplicate the dish at home, and was successful enough that it is now definitely a keeper. 

I started with tender cuts of pork. It's not necessary to use pork filet, but do choose a good quality boneless chop which is lightly marbled for tenderness. I didn't write anything down, so I'll simply walk you through it while trying to estimate the ingredient amounts. I seared the pork (which I had cut into small chunks) quickly over medium-high heat in a skillet to which I had added a a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. When the pork was nicely browned, I stirred in a mixture of about 3 Tablespoons of honey, 1/3 cup of heavy cream, a Tablespoon of butter, 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of chicken bouillon granules, a pinch of mustard, a quarter teaspoon of garlic powder, a few dashes of onion powder, salt, and pepper. Stir the mixture together , coating the pork with cream sauce. Simmer for a few minutes and then serve with roasted potatoes or pasta. I had roasted some new potatoes with parsley and butter - they went very well with the pork.

I normally would have used one or two fresh cloves of garlic, sauteed for a minute before adding the sauce ingredients, but I had run out of it and had to use the garlic powder. Feel free to tweak the recipe. It's a mildly-flavored dish, but is rich and delicious.

I didn't think to get a picture to share, so here is the one I snapped at the restaurant in France, which shows the pork served over a bed of fried potatoes:

Bon Appétit!

Peach Juice

It's peak peach season now. Our local produce market has sweet, juicy varieties from Arkansas and Georgia. They are delightful. Almost as good as the peaches of my childhood. This area was once known as the Peach Capitol of Kansas. There were several large orchards nearby, and our summers of fireflies, tag, swimming, and picnics were not complete without several visits to the farms to pick peaches. As the years passed, the trees began to die out. It was discovered that salt brine from oil wells had seeped into the groundwater, which destroyed acres and acres of our beloved peach trees. 

It's not easy to find fruit that can compare to the juicy, sweet deliciousness of those long-ago peaches. Each time I manage to find some that even come close to that incomparable  flavor, my childhood memories surface and I am taken back to those hot summer days. The family would pile into the car for the short ride to the orchard, where we would clamber onto a flat-bed trailer which would haul us into the sunny lanes dappled with shade from the fruit-laden trees. We probably ate almost as many peaches as we picked! Dad always said the orchard should just weigh the customers both before and after the picking and then charge by the pound!

When we returned home with sticky arms and fingers and a couple of bushels of golden - orange peaches, the work began. Mom wasn't a canner. She froze the peaches. We would work together in the kitchen, several of us, peeling and slicing the mountains of fruit. The peaches would be tossed with a bit of Fruit Fresh and some sugar, and then sealed into family-sized bags and gently placed into the freezer. And the best part? Ah, the best part was that on blustery, cold, winter evenings, Mom would thaw some of those peaches for dessert. Sometimes she would make peach pie or cobbler, but often it was a simple bowl of chilled peaches swimming in their sweet juices. One taste - and it was summer again. 

I have been taking full advantage of the availability of the fresh peaches these past couple of weeks. I have made peach pie, peach crisp, peach cobbler... and a simple dish of sliced, golden, peaches swimming in their sweet juices. Perhaps I should also fill the freezer. Winter is just around the corner.

Because I had some blueberries...

I have never really cared much for the taste of blueberries. I have always wanted to like them. They just seem a bit too bland. Maybe I have never really had good blueberries, I don't know. I do know that blueberries are considered to be a "superfood" because they are packed with antioxidants and blah-blah-blah. 

Anyway, I have recently discovered that I love blueberries when they are served atop a fresh, homemade, French yogurt cake, slathered with fluffy clouds of whipped cream. And also when they are served like this:

A grilled pork chop topped with blueberry-wine sauce is a pretty yummy way to serve blueberries! The sauce is enhanced with balsamic vinegar, brown sugar, lemon juice, and thyme. It really perked up those pork chops! Maybe I need to do a bit more experimenting with blueberries.

"Food is one of my favorite parts of the day."

Megan posted this to Facebook a while back, but it seems highly relevant here: "Things You Can Learn About Eating From Jennifer Lawrence."

Good advice!

Creamed Eggs on Toast

My parents raised chickens for years. It was a great way for them to supplement the diets of their large family. Dad took great care of his chickens, we children were only a little bit helpful with feeding the flock and gathering the eggs, and Mom cooked. Boy, did she cook! As you can imagine, we ate eggs and chicken often. Nothing is quite so good as a real, free-range, farm-fresh egg. Those chickens dined on prepared feed and grain and they were allowed to run free and forage for greens and insects. They also received table scraps. All of that combined meant that those eggs were full of flavor and nutrition. One of the dishes that Mom made often was creamed eggs on toast. It's still a family favorite and is one of the dishes I consider to be comfort food. Today, as I prepared that dish for my own midday meal, I was remembering my childhood and all those chickens. 

This dish is so simple to prepare that you don't even need a recipe. Simply make a white sauce, and when it has thickened, stir in chopped, hard-cooked egg and a bit of salt. I'm sure this dish would be great with the addition of some crisp bacon or herbs, but as comfort food goes, I prefer to prepare it as I enjoyed it in my childhood.

Here is a tip: When chopping several hard-cooked eggs, use a potato masher. You'll get the job done in no time!

La Maison Berthillon

On the subject of ice cream, check out the best ice cream shop in the world: La Maison Berthillon. It's on Île St. Louis in Paris, very near Notre Dame de Paris, and I've never actually been there, because I've heard the lines are horrendous. But there are a million distributors on the island, and the one I went to last time had 54 flavors, so I really don't feel like I'm missing much. Here's a list of their ice cream and sorbet flavors in French (note: links open to PDF files), and here's a partial list in English:

Ice cream:

• Whiskey coffee
• Cinnamon 
• Salted caramel
• Ginger caramel
• Mint leaf
• Foie gras
• Grand-Marnier
• Almond milk
• Lavender
• Candied chestnut ("with just a touch of rum")
• Honey nougat
• Gingerbread
• Pine nut praline
• Black licorice
• Speculos (Biscoff)
• Earl Grey Tea

Sorbet:

• Apricot
• Pineapple
• Roasted pineapple with fresh basil
• Exotic cocktail
• Extra bitter chocolate
• Cocoa with whiskey
• Black currant
• Wild strawberry
• Black cherry
• Raspberry rose
• Passion fruit
• Red currant
• Mandarin orange
• Lychee 
• Wild blackberry
• Blueberry
• Melon
• Blood orange
• Vine-ripened peach
• Peach and mint leaf
• Pear
• Rhubarb
• Green apple
• Lemon thyme
• Lemon verbena and mint
• Black currant yogurt

If I lived in Paris, I would eat there every day. So far I've tried mint leaf, one of the chocolates, cinnamon (best flavor in the universe) and extra bitter chocolate, which was so dark it was black and so rich I thought I would never need chocolate again (I was wrong). If I had the money for train fare, this is where I would go right now.