I’m usually a stickler for fresh ingredients, but sometimes the prepackaged stuff is just easier. For my clam sauce, I like to use cans of minced clams. I sometimes eat these directly out of the can as a snack. It’s weird, I know, but I was never really a potato chip kind of guy. My mother always kept junk food in the house for my sisters, but she bought wild rice, minced clams and mac & cheese for me.
I don’t know of it’s beach fever or just a craving for seafood, but we decided to make a big pot of seafood gumbo for our Memorial Day weekend staycation.
I’ve only made gumbo a few times. Making the roux is pain in the ass and the shrimp, fish and sausage aren’t cheap. So when I do get the itch to make it, I make a lot and freeze the leftovers.
When it starts to get cold and rainy outside, most people crave comfort foods like stews and casseroles. I crave Italian food. The funny thing is, my wife has grown to share this craving. So yesterday I decided to make some stuffed shells. If you’re going to take the time to make dishes like meatballs, stuffed shells or manicotti, you might as well make a lot and freeze them. It’s just too difficult and inconvenient to make small batches. So I bought all the ingredients to make cheese-stuffed shells and meat-stuffed shells.
As any avid cook knows, there’s no good place to store your herbs and spices. It seems like we’re limited to fumbling through a lazy susan or wasting good cabinet space on bottles that are only three inches high. I’ve always kept my spices on a shelf above the stove, but steam makes some of them clump. After we remodeled our kitchen, we tried to come up with a better way to organize and store our essential flavorings. Since this is where we do the cooking, we thought this should be where we keep the herbs and spices:
The weather is finally nice, so we decided to get the garden in before the rain this week. So last weekend, while I cut and seeded the grass, my wife tilled and planted most of the garden. We had some survivors from last year’s crop. Our chives are thriving, as well as our parsley, sage and oregano.
The right side of the garden will have herbs (rosemary, thyme, Greek oregano, parsley, chives, basil, mint and lavender), red and yellow onions, strawberries and cantaloupe. The left side will have heirloom, roma and green tomatoes, red and green bell peppers, cayenne and banana peppers, squash and zucchini. There’s more room, so maybe we’ll plant some radicchio and eggplant later this month.
