The past two days were all bright and sunny. On Friday it was warm enough to run shirtless at Track, and spend the evening walking the neighborhood with my friends before we went to see The Hunger Games (which is one of the best book based movies in awhile). On Saturday, Mom spent all day working in the yard, and Cy, Dad and I walked to the park with a 5-gallon bucket of water balloons and a sling-shot. With hopes of more warm, sunny weather, I set out today with a plan. I was going to make basil lemonade, and cinnamon-orange sorbet, and paella. But instead, the sun deigned to peak out from the clouds today, so we've got a summery meal, and a gray sky. There's just a little hint of sun behind the clouds, a point that's a little bit brighter than the rest of the sky.
I started early this afternoon, making the lemonade. The recipe was from the New York Times, Mark Bittman's food column. I juiced lemon's, strained the juice, and steeped the rinds with basil and sugar before mixing it all together. Once the lemonade was chilling in the fridge, I moved onto the ice cream. From the same NYT issue, it's a cinnamon-orange sorbet. I put sugar, a cinnamon stick, and and orange zest into orange juice, cooked it until the sugar dissolved, and threw it into the ice cream maker. A few hours later, we got started on the paella. It too, is a Bittman recipe, (uh-oh is this turning into another
Bittman tribute dinner?) It's a chorizo and clam paella, and is proving to be a little troublesome, though it should still be good.
Wow. The paella was
really good, the chorizo, onions, clams, rice and peas created an amazing flavor, not really something I can describe, it was far to complex for me. Let's just stick with, "It was good," and say that the only disappointment was that the clams weren't quite done when the rest of it was. The basil lemonade was just as amazing, with a complex flavor not usually seen in lemonade. It was incredibly sweet, and layered beneath the lemonade flavor, was just a little hint of basil. It would have made great popsicles, and is definitely a recipe I want to remember for this summer. The ice cream was also amazing. Somehow, it was creamy despite being just 2 parts orange juice, 1 part sugar, a cinnamon stick, and some orange zest. It was orange ice cream at it's very best. Also a recipe to remember for the warmer months. All told, an amazing, complex dinner, but maybe not the right season.
Today was warm and sunny. We went for a walk this morning at Lewis and Clark College (I drove). Turns out it has a beautiful, giant, campus. We then went home and worked in the yard. For dinner, Cy has made us BLT's, and his famous Majiggy Fruit Salad. And he's made us strawberry coolers to drink. Should be good, we've got ice cream for dessert and we'll be eating outside for the first time this year.
Memaw is in town this weekend, last night we went out to dinner at Tasty & Sons and this morning we went to The Pearl Bakery downtown. Just to make things exciting for everybody, I drove both ways both times. Then, to keep the anxiety crank turned full-force on Dad, I opted to make pizza on the grill. We're going to have three kinds pizzas, a sorpressata pizza, a roasted beet pizza, and a leek and gorgonzola pizza. We'll have an asparagus side-dish, and to drink I've made the basil lemonade that I made a few weeks back. This time though, I've added an additional twist, making it strawberry basil lemonade. Should be good.
Once the coals are ready, it's going to be go, go, go to get everything done around the same time. Right now Dad and I are doing a mís-en-place with all the pizza toppings. Once the coals are ready we'll take the pizza dough, currently spread out on three sheets of parchment paper on the kitchen counter, and flip them on to the grill. Once they've cooked a little bit, we'll flip them back over and add the toppings.
That was really good. We could have used about twice as much strawberry-basil lemonade, and I got some good ideas to improve it next time. (Summer mission: create the perfect lemonade.) The pizzas were very good as well, the sorpressata was a good, classic, american pie. The leek was both light and airy, and thick and cheesy from the gorgonzola. The roasted beet pie was sweet and salty, the honey and beets were beautifully offset by a sprinkling off salt applied to the top. The asparagus, off course, was catalonian style, super greasy. I've got to run, Cyrus has found a movie with Michael Hazanavicius, of The Artist, that Netflix describes as "The French answer to James Bond." I suspect it will be good. And we have a bowl of rhubarb crisp leftover from Friday waiting for me.
Side dishes tonight are asparagus and eggplant, both on the grill. One of the things I always forget, and then remember about grilling is how quick it is. Dad and I spent twenty minutes making sauces and rubs, and then twenty minutes sitting next to the grill, talking, and thinking about improvements we could make to the yard. Then we're done. I think we might want to eat outside tonight, it's warm and sunny out here.
I guess our grill just isn't hot enough, an hour after we were almost done, we still weren't done, and our coals are dying out. So we just transferred the lamb to the oven to finish up. We won't be eating before 7, but that's fine, because the sun will still be up. This was going to be a really good dinner, but our fire was unpredictable, and that got in the way.
Today's the last day of Spring Break, but you sure wouldn't know it by the weather. When we went to REI this morning, we drove through a light drizzle under a gray sky. For maybe 10 minutes this afternoon, the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, but instead of audaciously firing up the grill, then huddling over it in a winter coat with an umbrella to keep the fire from going out, as Cyrus usually does at this time of year, he's gone for a cold weather winter classic for Sundays, the indefatigable pirogi.
As always, the pirogi were good. But they were especially good today for some reason, with their potato and cheese insides and onion grease covered outsides. And, of course, you can't go wrong with Otto's sausage. Good stuff. And the sun came out while we were eating!
