Here's what you do when you can't be at the stadium for the first game of the season.
Game on the radio, hot dogs & fries from Skip's, beer from The Beer Growler. And during the seventh inning stretch, I'll be busting out the mandolin for a little "Take Me Out To The Ball Game." Feel free to sing along.
GO BRAVES!!!
Happy Easter to those of you celebrating it! We don't make a big deal out of it in our household, but it was a great day nonetheless.
One of our favorite comfort food spots, Our Way Cafe, hosted an Easter brunch that was totally scrumptious. They don't normally do brunch, but today's event was such a huge success, I'm hoping they'll make it a regular thing. Here we are enjoying our eggs, home fries, Pine Street Market bacon, biscuits, and gravy. Not to mention the cupcakes for dessert!
Meanwhile, in the parking lot, vehicles were gathering for an antique car parade. After brunch, we had a great time checking out all the cool cars.
Groovy grills!
Assorted old timey vehicles.
The pest control truck was made by a guy, from scratch! (You can just make a car?? Mind. Blown.) I was in love with that blue Ford on the bottom. I wanted Anthony to cause a distraction so I could steal it.
This cutie pie is Chumley. How he managed to restore this car with no thumbs, I have no idea, but he did a great job. Let's take a closer look at that tailfin....
Wow. I'm not generally a big fan of fins on cars, but these tail lights were spec.tac.ular. Then I became obsessed with taking pictures of taillights.
So many interesting design variations! One lady noticed me taking pictures of taillights and commented that people don't usually notice them, and that hood ornaments are the most popular subject for photos. Here I hope I've given these beautiful taillights the attention they deserve.
By far, though, the most jaw-dropping taillights had to be the ones on this (1958?) Mercury.
AMAZING.
Another angle.
Back view of the Mercury. I wish I'd gotten a shot of the whole car, because it was INSANE. Huge and shiny and full of all these weird, fabulous details.
So that was our Easter Sunday, non-Eastery though it was. I hope you all had a great day!
Summer's been making me grouchy this week. Either it's brain-meltingly hot, or it's thunderstorming, or a million bugs are trying to attack me, or some such crap. Mentally, I'm just trying to escape from it all.
Last weekend I camped out in front of the air-conditioner, closed the curtains and watched, like, eight episodes of True Blood (season four). To me, it's the ideal viewing for days when it's just too hot to step outside. The whole show feels swampy, and steamy, and requires no thought whatsoever. People are always getting naked on there, which makes perfect sense on these days when you run out of layers to remove in an attempt to cool off. Also, the vampires' nocturnal lifestyle holds a lot of appeal when there's so much oppressive sun and heat in real life.
Meanwhile, I've been reading this book about the plague which, in a weird way, is totally a feel-good story. Because no matter how miserable you feel, or how big your problems are, you probably didn't spend your day nursing three putrefying family members in your one-room house until they all died within hours of each other and needed to be buried in a mass grave that you had to dig with your own bare hands, RIGHT? Perspective, folks!
Escapism is good, and since a vaycay is not in the cards for me this summer, I'm living vicariously through others. Eartha Kitsch's recent posts about her cruise to Alaska had me green with envy (her home remodeling disaster posts, not so much).
Speaking of home-related projects, when you can't leave town for a change of scenery, the next best thing is collecting Pinterest pictures of ways you can change how things look around your house. Not that I can afford to buy any of these textiles, fixtures, etc., to spruce up Boogaloo Acres right now (shoot, I still haven't managed to scrounge up the spare cash for more spray paint to finish my glider project), but there's nothing wrong with a little eye candy, is there?
Anthony and I did treat ourselves to a modest night out at Twain's, where we met up with some friends to hear our other friends' band.
Wow, this post is kinda disjointed and rambling, but that's the state of my brain at the moment. You know how sometimes you just feel out of it? That's me this week. (But hey, at least I don't have the plague!)
We've reached that part of summer when the thought of hot food is just gross. I could live on salads, fruit, and ice cream, at this point.
That's some watermelon gazpacho I made the other day, based on (but not exactly) this recipe here. I used ground ginger and a whole jalapeño pepper, and added however much watermelon would fit in my blender after I put all the other ingredients in. It's delish!
Salad-wise, we have a batch of at least one of these in the fridge at all times, ready to be side dishes for dinner, or lunches all by themselves.
Black Bean and Couscous Salad (I substitute bulgur for the couscous, because we tend to always have bulgur in the pantry)
Balela (I became obsessed with this Middle Eastern chickpea salad last year, and it's in heavy rotation again this summer)
Tabouleh (this recipe calls only for parsley, but I like to use half mint, half parsley)
Tomato Basil Couscous Salad (also delicious with quinoa or bulgur as a base!)
And for those times when a tossed green salad is all you're really after, this has been my dressing of choice lately. (The recipe is for a restaurant size bulk portion! Size it way down to suit your particular salad-eating needs.)
What are some of your go-to summer meals?
Relaxing on a perfect summer evening (and the wine fairy stopped by with more gifts).
Fresh from Anthony's mom's garden in Tennessee.
Stacyverb is not a cooking blog, but sometimes it is an eating blog! And cooking is how we get to the eating part, so....
The other day when I mentioned some of my current favorite blogs, I overlooked one that has been particularly rocking my world lately, and that would be Budget Bytes. Beth, the woman behind BB, had me with this line: "I am broke and I love to eat." ME TOO. She has tons of great recipes for meals that are easy and very inexpensive to prepare.
Since discovering Budget Bytes a few months ago, the menu here at Boogaloo Acres has vastly improved. And I think it's made us eat healthier, too. For example, let's say I'm in the grocery store and I'm thinking about treating myself to some ice cream. Because of the way Beth breaks down her recipes to show you exactly how much each serving costs, now when I think about spending $3.99 on a pint of Ben & Jerry's, my next thought is immediately, but for $3.99 I could buy ingredients for a whole dinner for two with a Budget Bytes recipe and still have leftovers for lunch. (Yes, really.) Sometimes the siren song of junk food is irresistible, but usually, the real meal wins out.
Here's one delicious example, which I made for dinner last night. It's called Summer Vegetable Tian. It's got one onion, one potato, one yellow squash, one zucchini, and one tomato (the first good-looking one of the season--hurray!), plus garlic, thyme, olive oil, salt and pepper.
The onion and garlic are sauted in olive oil and then spread over the bottom of the baking dish (Beth suggested rubbing the dish with a little butter first, so I did). Then you layer your sliced veggies like so, sprinkle them with salt, pepper, and thyme, cover it all with foil and bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes. Remove the foil, top the veggies with shredded cheese (I used mozzarella) and bake it for another 20 minutes or so. More detailed instructions and much better pictures here.)
This would make a great side dish or, as I had it last night, a tasty vegetarian dinner by itself (we're a meat-eating household, but we do enjoy meatless meals as well). It was a nice cozy dish for a rainy night when I was home alone, snuggled up on the couch with some silly sitcoms and a glass of white wine from the wine fairy.
When I make this again, I think I'll add another tomato (this was a little unbalanced in favor of the squashes) and more salt and pepper. Beth's instructions clearly said to be "GENEROUS" with those, and she was right. I salted and peppered it again on my plate, and that really helped the flavors of the veggies come together.
Thank you, Budget Bytes!
As you may recall, I recently reported that we had a backlog of opened bottles of wine here at Boogaloo Acres and I was frantically trying to find good uses for all of it (besides the obvious).
Since that post, we did drink some, and we gave some away. The marinara sauce turned out FANTASTIC and is in the freezer. Last Thursday, I made sangria. Christy and I drank half of it and I poured the other half into a quart mason jar, also now in the freezer. On some hot June day, a sangria slushie is gonna taste pretty damn good.
Other uses for leftover wine? Well, here's some nice Shiraz freezing in ice cube trays, for future cooking u se. (Disclaimer: all the photos in this post are terrible. They're blurry and the wine looks brown instead of, well, wine-colored. Trust me when I say that all of these items look much more enticing in person!)
Granita! Instructions from here, minus all the pear business, although that sounds delish and I might try that another time.
My friend Megan sent me a link to this recipe for wine syrup. Oooh, this will be so decadent over some ice cream this summer, or tossed with some veggies in lieu of balsamic vinegar.
Readers piped up with some excellent ideas. Jo suggested wine jelly, which honestly I don't think I even knew was a thing, but it is, and it seems do-able. And yummy.
For now, the vino supply is back down to a manageable level. But I'm bookmarking all this stuff, because it's only a matter of time until we once again end up with a wine surplus.
In the meantime, this will be my anthem--an old favorite from my childhood. (Should children even know a song about a heartbroken janitor on a bender? Maybe not. Whatever. I've always loved this song. Also? I need a hat like that.)
It had been a while since Anthony and I had visited the Atlanta Botanical Garden, so we decided to spend some time there today. Our membership is about to expire, so we just had to take advantage of it one more time.
So much for that bit of a "cold" spell we had last week--temps reached the 90s today. I took lots of pictures, but am spotlighting the pretty things I saw that thrive on a hot hot hot day like today.
These orchids might be my favorite thing I saw today. The color combination is exactly what my eye craves in the haze of humid Atlanta summers--hot, bright, unmissable.
The steam of the conservatory makes it easy to pretend you're on a tropical adventure in a lush jungle somewhere.
Post-Garden treat, speaking of tropical: Italian ice in Island Fusion flavor. Mango, coconut, and I don't know what else. Soooo good. Several years ago, they were handing out piles of coupons for FREE Rita's ice at Anthony's job. We're still working off of that stack! (It was a lot of coupons.) This really hit the spot after tackling all those hills in the blazing sun.
Back home, showered and rehydrated, I made a spicy veggie stir fry for dinner, and might paint my toenails purple tonight. Hope you all had a fabulous weekend!
Our next-door neighbors have a wine business, and they often have partial bottles of wine leftover from their tastings. They're very generous about sharing these bottles, many of which have had only one or two glasses poured from them. Almost-full bottles of wine often just magically appear on our porch, causing us to exclaim, "The wine fairy was here!"
How's this for a problem? We have too much wine. I know, many some of you are thinking, "Is that even possible??" Well, if the bottles were unopened, it would be no problem whatsoever. But with open bottles, time is not on our side. Wine keeps showing up, faster than we can dispatch it (we came home to five bottles one recent evening). We drink some, we give some to friends, but still--it's accumulating.
So this week I'm making it an ongoing project to find uses for our surplus vino. Today's undertaking: red wine marinara sauce.
It's been simmering on the stove for an hour or so, and WOW does the house smell fantastic right now. I'm using this recipe, but substituting red for white wine because that's what we have (and what we prefer for marinara). I doubled the recipe and plan on freezing it. We should get many yummy meals out of this pot.
But...that whole pot of sauce only used one cup of wine. I have plans for frozen sangria later in the week. I also might freeze some wine by itself in ice cube trays, to be thawed for cooking use at some future time when (if!) we don't have any wine in the house. Other projects under consideration: granita, beef bourignon, homemade vinegar.
Any other suggestions?
Update: A few hours after I posted this, there was a knock on the door. Yup, you guessed it--three more bottles of wine.
