The Outcome of a Trip to the Farmers' Market

Sunday was the first Sunday we have been home all summer. Yes, we have been gone quite a bit. A family vacation in Maine was followed by a week at work, then a cruise to Bermuda, a trip to New Jersey, and finally, a visit to Pennsylvania. Yes, we realize that all we've told you about so far is Maine. We have a lot to get to, and we will get to it eventually. For now, however, we are settling back into our home, catching up on our laundry and TV, lamenting the state of our garden, and playing with our cats who obviously missed us. And yes, taking our first visit this season to the Coventry Regional Farmers' Market. At last!

The harvest is in full swing (except at our house, where every plant has been choked by weeds or eaten by who-knows-what), and we couldn't wait to make something with the bounty of summer offered by the market's vendors. Since it seems that all we've done is eat rich foods (did we mention that cruise?), we wanted to make a dish that was heavy on vegetables. We bought all sorts of fresh fruits and vegetables and a crusty bread, and when we grabbed the last couple dozen Stonington littlenecks from the fish truck, a dish started to come together in our minds. A beautiful pint of blackberries inspired the pre-dinner cocktail, and for dessert, we split a "boozy" cupcake from the NoRA Cupcake Company Truck.

Note: Everything in these two recipes is fresh from the farmers' market, our herb garden, or the neighbor's garden, with the following exceptions: the pantry staples of olive oil, sugar, salt and pepper; the Italian sausage (from our freezer); the bourbon (Woodford Reserve); and can of beer (Heineken).

Blackberry Mint Julep

(makes 2 cocktails)

Ingredients:

1/2 cup blackberries (saving 2 for garnish)

4 tablespoons mint leaves (saving 2 for garnish)

2 tablespoons sugar

3 ounces bourbon

In a large cocktail shaker, muddle together the blackberries, mint and sugar. Fill shaker with ice then add bourbon. Shake well, then strain into ice-filled cocktail glasses. Serve garnished with a mint leaf and a blackberry.

Clams with Sausage and Swiss Chard

Ingredients:

4 links hot Italian sausage

6 new potatoes, quartered

6 cipollini onions, peeled and quartered

kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 dozen raw littleneck clams

4-5 leaves Swiss chard, stems removed

1 can beer

In a large, somewhat deep cast-iron pan, brown the sausage on all sides over high heat. Remove from pan and set aside to rest. Place the quartered potatoes and onions in the pan and season with salt and pepper. Cook until softened and caramelized. Cut the sausage into rounds and rinse the clams. Place sausage, clams and Swiss chard in the pan. Pour beer over the ingredients and cook, covered, for 10 minutes, until clams open. Serve with grilled crusty bread.

NoRa Cupcake Company's "Jamaican Moon" Cupcake, a chocolate cake soaked with Onyx Moonshine then topped with both mocha and marshmallow frostings and garnished with a chocolate-covered espresso bean. 

For the Love of Lobster

We have returned from our annual family vacation at Goose Rocks Beach in Maine, and we sure had a great week. Since the weather wasn't perfect, we had plenty of time to spend with Amy's family (parents, sister, brother-in-law, and niece) chatting, playing games, and (of course) eating. As it is the annual vacation (6 years running), we quickly and pretty seamlessly turn to a routine. There's an early-morning walk to the nearby store for a muffin or donut, known as pre-breakfast. Then once Auntie Amy is up, she makes the real breakfast, usually eggs, bacon, sausage, and English muffins, or perhaps a frittata made of leftovers from the night before. Eschewing big lunches for quick right-off-the-beach snacks, we leave room for big family dinners, and these are the most fun.

The Ocean Roll

Menu at The Ocean Roll

While we often cook these dinners, for example grilling steaks one night and pizzas another, it is Maine and that means seafood. So we'd love to tell you about our new discovery - The Ocean Roll. An antique truck located next to an antiques shop on Route 1 (Portland Road), Kennebunk, this truck is Maine on wheels. To start with, the food truck is part of Maine's history, as it was originally built as the canteen for the Maine Civil Defense. 

Fried Clam Box and Hot Lobster Roll at The Ocean Roll

The two of us stopped in for lunch on Saturday and then the whole family got take-out for dinner Sunday night. Yeah, it was that good. Lobster salad rolls, or the Amy-preferred hot buttered lobster rolls were packed with fresh lobster meat. Whole belly clams were lightly battered and fried to a perfect golden brown. The cole slaw was creamy, crunchy and well-seasoned. The service, friendly and welcoming. And the truck is just....cool. Compared to the super-touristy and rather expensive Clam Shack in downtown Kennebunkport, we think The Ocean Roll is twice as good at half the price. We highly recommend it!

Annual Family Vacation Lobster Feast

So yeah, we had seafood two days in a row. That didn't mean that by Wednesday, we weren't ready for more. Wednesday was our traditional lobster-n-steamers night, when we order steamed lobsters and clams from Wolff Farm & Lobster. They steam them for us, and we eat them up - a pound of steamers and two lobsters each. It's a feast fit for a family vacation, and we look forward to the "lobster-eating orgy" every time.

Huge lobster in Sanders Lobster Co. tank (compare to dime)

Steamers

Now you would think after all this we would have had our fill of the crustacean for which Maine is famous, but wait! There's more! On our drive home, as we always do, the two of us stopped by Sanders Lobster Company in the Strawbery Banke section of Portsmouth, NH to buy more. Yeah, we did. We pass the fish market and go directly to the docks where we can find culls (small lobsters, often - but not always! - missing one claw) for $3.99 a pound. This year we had some restraint. We bought 6 culls and 3 pounds of steamers that they packed in some ice for us and we cooked up and gobbled down when we got home. After all, a good vacation doesn't end when you leave. So here's to lobster, Maine, New England, summer, vacation, and most of all, family. We love you all!!!

More lobster at home

Our First Paella (Secret Recipe Club)

Happy Secret Recipe Club Reveal Day! This is the club in which we are assigned a food blog and we make and post a recipe from it. Our assignment for April was the blog Foodness Gracious by Gerry Speirs. Gerry is a stay-at-home-dad who loves to cook and bake and has tons of amazing recipes on his blog - from crackers to caramels and curries to cookies. His photos are drool-worthy and his recent 3-in-a-row series of macaron recipes made us crave those little French bites of deliciousness. But you know when you have a gift certificate to Williams-Sonoma and you just have to buy a paella pan even though you have never made paella? Yeah? So do we. So when we saw Gerry's recipe for seafood paella, we grabbed our shiny new pan and got to work.

Seafood stock...we didn't make our own.

Trader Joe's Saffron - a great product at a great price.

Our paella pan. It's not 17 inches wide.

Gerry's recipe can be found here. Note that he mentions that it makes "a lot of paella." Note that while he admits that it's okay with paella to be a little loose with the measuring, he also mentions that his paella pan is 17 inches wide, a fact we overlooked when we decided to follow his recipe with little to no tweaks. In our 15 inch paella pan. Yeah. The convo went something like, "Honey, are you sure it says four cups of rice? That seems like a lot." "Yes, for the third time, it says 4 cups of rice. He used arborio, but it should be fine." Well, there were some moments when things were overflowing onto the stove. And we ended up calling in not one, not two, but three of the neighbors to help us eat dinner (which they didn't mind at all!).

The Evolution of Our Paella (in pictures):

Everyone (and in the end, that was about seven people total) loved the flavors in this dish. We used shrimp, clams and chorizo because we love that spicy meatiness paired with the seafood. It was really delicious and in the end every bit of rice was eaten. However, our lack of attention to the size of our pan vs. Gerry's resulted in a very crowded pan which then resulted in a consistency more like risotto than traditional paella. (Which isn't horrible!) What follows is the recipe we actually made, based on Gerry's. But next time, we will use half the amount of rice because of the size of our pan, and otherwise follow Gerry's recipe for yumminess.

Ingredients:

8 cups seafood broth

1 teaspoon saffron

1/2 cup olive oil

2 medium onions, diced

1 green bell pepper, chopped

1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes, with juice

6 cloves garlic, chopped

salt and pepper to taste

4 cups medium grain rice *(depending on the size of your paella pan!)

1/2 pound chorizo

1 pound littleneck clams

1/2 pound raw shrimp, peeled and deveined

Heat the seafood stock with the saffron in a large pot. In a large paella pan heat 1/2 cup of olive oil. Add the onion and cook until translucent. Add the bell pepper and continue to cook for 3-4 minutes, stirring often. Add the diced tomatoes and garlic and simmer for another 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Pour in 4 cups of rice and stir until it's all been covered by the tomato mixture. Slowly add the stock, stirring gently so that the rice gets coated and sits in the stock.***(See note below)

Continue to cook until rice begins to become tender. Add the chorizo and continue to cook 5 minutes. Add the clams by stuffing each one into the rice, making sure they are mostly covered by the paella. After about another 25-30 minutes, once nearly all of the stock has been absorbed, add the shrimp and cook another five minutes until shrimp turn pink. Then take the pan off the heat, cover with some foil, and allow to rest for 7-10 minutes.

Note: ***(this part took some time because all the stock wouldn't fit in the pan, so we added as much as could fit, stirred until it was absorbed, added more and continued to do this until all the stock was gone, obviously leading to our risotto-like consistency).

Cajun Clams

One food Amy missed while living in New Orleans is clams. While NOLA was an amazing place for seafood, they didn't serve clams. Oysters? Sure. Shrimp? Tons of 'em. Crawfish? Catfish? Crab? Check, check and check. But clams? Nowhere to be found. Back in Connecticut, however, clams are common and we're glad for that. Last week, we bought some steamers and littlenecks and made them, Cajun style.

Our NOLA-fied inspiration was two gorgeous links of andouille sausage Amy's mom bought us from Pekarski's Sausage in South Deerfield, Massachusetts (they don't have a website, but you can read about Pekarski's here). The other ingredients we chose because they enhance the fabulous flavors found in andouille, are typical ingredients in Cajun-style cooking, and/or they add a touch of pretty color to the dish. For our liquid, we used a pale ale, but only because we can't find Abita Turbodog here in New England. If it's not one thing, it's another!

Ingredients:

2 links andouille sausage

1 pound steamer clams

1 pound littleneck clams

1 cup chopped Vidalia onion

1 small yellow bell pepper, roasted, then chopped

1 cup chopped tomato

1 cup chopped sweet potato

1 bottle of pale ale

small bunch chives (chopped) for garnish

Brown the sausage over high heat on all sides, then cut it into rounds. Place the sausage and remaining ingredients (except chives) in a large pot and cook, covered, over high heat for 10-15 minutes, until clams open. Garnish with chopped chives and serve with crusty French bread and ice cold beer.