Spot on A Great New Cook Book and Cooks

This is my birthday present from my daughter and her family and I love, love, love it! I thoroughly enjoy Jamie Oliver's cooking show on the Food Network, but as it is now on very early in the morning I do not get a chance to see it. Our daughter's family DVR's it and we watch it together at a more ( to my way of thinking ) reasonable hour. Even better, I usually have a grandchild or two in my lap as we watch Jamie..oh joy! My husband is the "foodie" in the family and I thoroughly enjoy doing the table setting,being the go-for, and clean-up help when he prepares delicious meals , quite often, for friends and family. After all, my reward is that I get to eat fine food and drink fine wine and visit with people we love. Such a small price ...but I digress. My daughter asked what I wanted for my birthday and I suggested maybe a DVD of Jamie Oliver, not realizing he had a cookbook published. What a cookbook! It surpasses his show. It shows pictures of his gardens, him hunting, cooking outdoors, and much more...all done very practically too. As the wife of a hunter, it is refreshing to have a healthy view of such a much-maligned endeavor. Well prepared game of any sort is a rare thing now-a-days. I cannot say enough in favor of this cook book, and I will be reading it from cover to cover...and I have only read one other cookbook that way...might write about it later. All this to say that my husband suggested I cook through this book and blog about it like the movie "Julie, Julia". Nope, not going to do that, but I have decided I will blog every Friday starting next week about recipes from Jamie's book, and cook my way through it. Jamie's book is orderd seasonally and I will prepare his recipes accordingly. I will start with Autumn recipes and hopefully my husband will give me a LOT of help and we will have opportunities to share these meals with friends and family . I have been very, very busy preserving the harvest and bounty of the garden my husband so lovingly prepared, planted and tended. All he asks is that I do not let the fruit and vegetables go to waste. Until this year , my poor husband's labors have oft been wasted or ended up as chicken food because I am at the fairs from mid- August til the end of September and when home am too exhausted to do much canning, freezing, etc. Then I am ashamed for the waste and sad for my husband's hard work for naught. No more! I have canned pickles, jams, and tomorrow will can Tomato Jam, a recipe I found on this wonderful blog: One Perfect Bite* ( click here). I am excited about trying this jam out on broiled French Bread with a dollop of goat cheese on top. Another book my daughter and her family have ordered for me is by Nigella Lawson*( click here). I have seen a few of her shows ( Nigella Bites) on the Food Network, but she, too, is now on way too early for me. There is just something so pleasant about a woman who loves to cook AND eat too! I watched her prepare a few egg dishes awhile ago and thought I could get excited about cooking like that. Can't wait for my new cook book by her! Meanwhile, because I have been busy canning produce I have been making easy breezy dinners. That is O.K. with my husband because he has been coming home from work and straight-way working on finishing his new Honey house / pump house. It is looking good and we have been needing a new pump-house and water pump for a long time. It has room for all my husbands' bee-keeping equipment, and also has been prepared for extracting and storing honey. Yay! Dinner tonight was sliced ripe tomatoes, with baked chicken, toast and FETA PEPPER DIP , thanks to Noble Pig *( click here)! It is good, try it, you'll like it! "Here is what I have seen to be good and fitting: to eat, to drink and enjoy oneself in all one's labors in which he toils under the sun during the few years of his life which God has given him; for this is his reward." Ecclesiastes 5:18

Scary ( ?) Picture and Recipe From A Noble Pig

~ Look at the picture of our porch carefully. I did not notice this until I pulled the picture up on my computer....( cue scary music )....I did not know my Joey cat was in the picture. It did not show up on the small screen of my digital camera.....shiver and tremble.... O.K., maybe I did not see him because I wasn't wearing my reading glasses and the screen is very, very small. But anyway, just look at him in the blur, barely showing. A black cat, a big pumpkin, October.....hmmm. And, I did NOT pose him for this. So this picture was just a bit of a treat, or trick ?~ Anyway, my Hubby and I have been a bit busy. I am getting ready for the Christmas bazaars, and he is busy at work, catching up on all the important things he needs to do at his job. I had to run a lot of errands and lingering in the back of my mind...no, blaring out to me " make me for dinner ! You're so hungry for me...make me for dinner ! " was the recipe I saw on Noble Pig's blog early in the morning as I was finishing up some e-mails and my blog. 1-2-3 Dinner! ~Well, don't you know, I printed up the recipe and stuck it in my purse before I went to bed. I had to stick it in my purse so I would remember the recipe and buy the few things we did not have stocked in our fridge or pantry. Specifically Chinese 5 Spice Powder. Never heard of that before, so I knew I needed to buy it. ~ When I got home from my errands, and with the above mentioned spice my Hubby began to make our dinner while I cleaned up and started the rice. The dinner is very, very good. Thank-you to Noble Pig's son who requested this recipe for dinner and suggested she post it on her blog. Thank-you Noble Pig for giving us this recipe, it is delicious and we will make it again. By the way, the only alteration we made in the recipe is we used MY home made plum jam and Hubby sprinkled sesame seeds on top of the chicken and rice when it was plated. ~ If you want to make this, and you will very much like it and especially appreciate how easy and quick it is to make, why just click on NOBLE PIG in my sidebar and take a gander at the October 23, 2008 posting of this recipe.

~Here is our dinner. Hubby made enough extra for his lunch tomorrow. Very good !~ "Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly." M.F.K. Fisher ~"Good food ends with good talk." Geoffrey Neighbor, Northern Exposure 1993

Spot On Dinner ! Yum !!!

~~~" If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold , it would be a merrier world." J.R.R. Tolkein~~~I cannot leave Hubby alone with the Food Network. It is dangerous I tell you ! I go to bed with a spotless kitchen ( I am a night person and I clean before I go to bed ) and I wake up with the kitchen looking like an army of chefs were busy while I slept. Gosh darn-it, the Food Network strikes again. Dear Hubby was inspired by Mario, Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson....Bobby Flay, anyway, Hubby has whipped up a gourmet breakfast again ! Since I am not a morning person, breakfast just doesn't appeal to me until around noon. So after many years of marriage he knows NOT to wake me to eat breakfast. Just leave me a cup of very good coffee and I will come around and enjoy leftover breakfast round noon!~~~

~~~Since I have discovered the world of blogs, and FOOD BLOGS...Hubby has had a whole new world opened up. Now we have the NOBLE PIG ( click on sidebar) to seduce my Hubby. He checks her blog in the morning. He could not wait to tell me about her new postings when I was away for a few days. He clicks on ALL her food and wine links ! And he loves to try her recipes . So, here goes another posting about food. Mind you, I am not going to post the recipe, Cathy at Noble Pig does that very well and this recipe is hers..so check out her posting titled 'A Tiny Addiction" for that.~~~

~~~Here are the assembled ingredients to the recipe. Scallops, Champagne grapes , butter, onion, lemon. Our ingredients are lacking the almonds...Hubby forgot to buy them assuming we had them already. So we tried this with toasted pine nuts...it was O.K., but almonds would have been better, and since Hubby bought lots of scallops and grapes, he will pick up some almonds on the way home from work and we will have this dish tomorrow night too ! With almonds. Hey, any excuse to eat this again works.~~~

~~~Hubby is busy preparing our dinner. He asks me to go out to the garden and pick lettuce for the salad. I pick lettuce, fling a few fat slugs I found eating my lettuce to the ducks, then come on in and wash the lettuce very well. Hubby will assemble the salad to his liking.~~~

~~~Dinner is ready. Hubby has selected his wine of choice, we cooked green beans freshly picked from our garden, and to the salad Hubby has added tomatoes and Feta cheese.~~~

~~~Is your mouth watering ? Does this make you hungry ? It should. This is tongue tingling, toe tickling, heart warming good !~~~

~~~Hubby waits for me to taste his labor of love. ~~~

~~~Yes, it is pretty good. I think we will have to try this again tomorrow night WITH almonds!!!

~~~"Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity." Voltaire