recipes « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

recipes

A recipe, a grand football joke and music

I made dinner last night, a new recipe for us, and very occasionally I share those here. So here’s the recipe.

My dinner started off with a chickpea salad with a homemade dressing. Make the dressing first:

1/2 cup – fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup – generic mild red wine vinegar
3 cloves – garlic
1 teaspoon – kosher salt
fresh black pepper

Mince the garlic cloves. Mix the liquids with the garlic. Add the salt and pepper. While that rests, put together your salad:

1 can – chickpeas/garbanzo beans
1 – large cucumber
1 tray – of grape tomatoes
1/4 cup – Athenos Garlic and Herb Feta cheese
1/4 cup – red onion
Fresh pepper

Quarter the cucumber. You should get around three cups. Halve the tomatoes, which should turn into about two cups. Rinse and add the chickpeas. Pour in the crumbled feta and diced onions. When ready to serve, strain any stray bits of garlic from the dressing and then pour into the salad, tossing to cover everything.

The main dish was ravioli with arugula and romano cheese:

1 pound – fresh or frozen cheese ravioli
1 clove of garlic
1/2 teaspoon – kosher salt
1/4 cup – extra-virgin olive oil
2 – shallots
3 tablespoons – red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon – honey Dijon mustard
3 cups – arugula (It’s a vegetable.)
Pepper to taste

Boil a pot of water while mashing your garlic (over salt) into smithereens, making a nice past-like substance. Drop the ravioli in your pot and stir. Let them boil until they float.

Pour your oil into a small skillet over medium. Add in your new garlic paste and diced shallots. Brown that mixture, which should be about two or three minutes. Then pour over it your vinegar, mustard and fresh pepper. Remove quickly from the heat.

Your ravioli is probably done by now. Drain that. Put it in a bowl, pour in the skillet’s contents and toss with your arugula. This is where your pecorino or parmesan goes. Serve hot. Enjoy a reasonably healthy meal.

Every so often I find something online and think “This, beyond the obvious military and financial and communication purposes, is what the web was made for.”

This is not that, but APAAWWWLLLLO 13 is worth seeing.

As has been correctly pointed out in the comments at SB Nation, Ken Mattingly, so ably played by Gary Sinise, is an Auburn man, and thus should not be cheering. Everything else feels wholly correct, however.

Naturally Forrest Gump is driving the thing.

YouTube Cover Theater: We find covers online and allow the talent of undiscovered folks playing music in their bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens to shine through. It is like every third show on network television, but without the more annoying parts.

Today’s featured covered artist(s) are the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. If you don’t understand their relative importance, open another tab in your browser and do a bit of Googling as these videos play.

First, here’s an older gentleman playing through a ceramic tunnel into the most acoustically vibrant church designed in the galaxy singing American Dream:

Mr. Bojangles:

OK, so this guy is singing this to his grandmother on her 80th birthday at her request. Automatic entry:

Two of these songs were written by Rodney Crowell, so I guess next week we’ll have to feature covers of songs he performed.

I like, even more than covers, on-stage collaboration. Here’s Nitty Gritty Dirty Band, Allison Kraus and others covering a Johnny Russell classic:

This became way more country-folk than I’d intended when I started. Enjoy the arugula!

adventures / cycling / iPhone / memories / photo / recipes / site / weekend — Comments Off
1
Jan 12

Catching up — New Year’s edition

Happy New Year! And in order to look ahead we must look back. Previously I’ve written posts detailing of all of the interesting, important and neat thing that happened in the previous year. I’m not going to do that this year. The archives are in the column to the right if you are interested, but the short version is this:

A.B.D.
Conferences in Troy, Little Rock, Boston, Portland, and St. Louis
Visited Bermuda, Notre Dame, Gulf Shores, D.C., and others
Took a much needed summer break
I rode my bike about 1,000 miles, but not nearly enough
I worked a lot, but not nearly enough
We generally had a terrific, lovely year

So with done, let’s empty the last few photographs from late in the year that I’ve been holding for just this post.

This is a second cousin of mine. Apparently he had an appendectomy in the summer and later in the year the hospital turned him into a newspaper advertisement. His great-grandmother, my grandmother, showed me this ad at Christmas:

Feel free to enjoy this delicious blueberry muffin recipe:

Toys R Us, on Christmas Eve. Spooky place:

The Yankee, as a child at the beach. She still flashes me this smile:

Tomorrow: 2012 jokes!

adventures / family / food / photo / recipes / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
27
Dec 11

The day after the day after Christmas

Went to the mall. That’s safe, right?

Santa’s gothic stand is still in place, but no one has any more use for it.

It is as if we’ve said: The season has passed you by, old man. We’re here to return things, not ask for more from you. And why did you bring me this awful thing anyway?

We were not returning things, however. We’d ventured into the cold and damp for a visit to the Apple Store. No longer do people wish to see Saint Nick. Now they are looking for Saint Steve.

We were there to look at iPads for my father-in-law. He wanted something a bit more new than his hulking desktop. He’d told us what he wanted to do and we decided that this might be the way to go. We just had to put one into his hands.

This being his first Apple Store experience, it was a bit eye-opening. We showed him the basics in the crowded store, he didn’t seem especially into it at first, but ended up buying one. We snagged a salesman pretty quickly. He went through the data-mining procedure. Told my father-in-law to sign his device. He looked around in vain for a pen, a stylus, anything. The kid was concerned with his lunch break.

“What? Am I supposed to use my finger?” he asked, if a bit sarcastically.

“Oh yeah. Just use your finger. I see it every day and have gotten used to it. Sorry,” he said.

This was the first thing my father-in-law had ever signed for with his fingertips. We live in an age of wonders.

Got him home and opened the box. The Yankee signed him up for iTunes. I threw way too much information at him at once. He logged in, found his home network, registered and started playing with it. One little hiccup later and he was suddenly a professional.

My mother-in-law came in and said “Is this how it is going to be from now on?”

“Huh?”

She said, “Finally I can have control of the remote. For the first time since we’ve had a remote!”

They’re on a cable system that has an app which acts as a remote control.

Had dinner with The Yankee’s collegiate diving coach. They were comparing dives they threw a decade ago. They seemed to recall teammates technique with alarming clarity. Let that be a lesson for all of us.

We had dinner at a place called The Black Duck. It is an old ship that is tied to the bank under an interstate. It looks like it is falling into the river. It was featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. Guy Fieri pointed out on the show that it looked like the place was falling into the river.

It could be that the place is falling into the river.

I wondered if it was happening on a trip to the restroom, where the floor is at a severe tilt. Turns out you’re OK as long as you notice the tilt. It is when you don’t feel the angle, I was told, that you should call a cab.

The steamed clams were a big feature on the show, but the burgers were the quintessential calling card. I had the stuffed bleu cheese burger. It was pretty good. You would think places featured on a show like that would blow you away, but this was perfectly acceptable. It was a bit pricey, but that could be the regional thing, too. As with the few other places featured on that show, this one gets some bad reviews online, but that could be two trolls with an axe to grind against the Food Network for all anyone knows.

The stuffed procedure involves tearing apart 12 ounces, putting the cheese in the middle and then putting one part of the patty on top of the other, closing up the seams so there’s no leakage. I was surprised to learn from the segment that these were 12-ounce patties. I do believe they cooked them down. Judge for yourself:

By the time we got back the in-laws were asleep. The iPad was nowhere to be found.

cycling / iPhone / photo / recipes / Wednesday — Comments Off
6
Jul 11

Another wall broken

We often have this conversation at night:

Me: Do you want to ride tomorrow?

The Yankee: Yes.

Me: How far do you want to go?

The Yankee: X miles.

Me: Where do you want to go.

We had this conversation last night, in fact. This morning she said “I want to go here and there, hill and dale and so on.”

She did not, but you don’t care about the street names. What you do care about is when she said ” … and then come back here to fuel up.”

Which, I’ve decided today, is the meanest thing she’s ever said.

See, I’d figured I’d do my 30 miles — because I am at a place where doing less than 15 is a joke, doing 20 barely seems an effort, but 30 is time well spent AND I can still function like a human being for the rest of the day. I’d do my 30 and then come home, rest, hydrate, shower, you know, that stuff. And then later this evening I could mow the lawn.

I am aided in this because, being from the north, the Deep South summer wipes her out. She decided earlier this week she can ride in humidity — it was odd hearing her admit that — but it is the sun that truly hurts. And, if you think about country roads, or even urban areas, rare is the spot where you can be in a lot of shade. July. Deep South. And so on.

So she starts out, and then I play catch up. I pass her. I get home and have a refreshing beverage and think “I’m done. She’ll get home and by then it will be serious July and no longer the early morning and that’ll be the day’s ride.”

But no.

She decides to go back out. And I’m stubborn, so I decide to go back out. She gets a head start. I catch her, and so on. She has a flat tire. I help with that. Turning right at the top of this hill — which I’ve climbed twice, because I had to go back for the tire — means going home. Turning left means we continue our pre-existing route. She turns left, figuring that, having done 45 miles, she’s pressing on.

There’s an expression we’ve learned in long duration exertion called bonking. It is defined as “a condition caused by the depletion of glycogen stores in the liver and muscles, which manifests itself by sudden fatigue and loss of energy.”

I think I had several bonks today.

But we rode 60 miles. SIXTY.

And finally we made it home. Now we’re not doing anything else for the rest of the day that requires coordinated muscle effort, because, really.

She made a delicious dinner. We had a late, large lunch. (Because we’d burned something like 4,000 calories pedaling around town.) And then we dove into Morgan Murphy’s Off the Eaten Path, which is a ringing endorsement for dives and out of the way places across the South (and, for some reason, Delaware and Maryland).

The Yankee’s mother gave us this book. We’ve been looking forward to trying most everything in it. Over the weekend we put sticky notes on each page marking a recipe we’d like to try. Basically we now have a book with sticky notes on most every page. That was a useful exercise.

Tonight we had chicken tortilla soup from Henry’s Puffy Tacos, in San Antonio, Texas. Delicious. Want the recipe?

adventures / Auburn / Friday / friends / iPhone / photo / recipes — Comments Off
27
May 11

We are taking a trip

She’s wearing my aviators, but she’s not flying the plane.

The Yankee flew the car, though. And that was a problem. Just as we got on the freeway and up to a NASCAR speed the whole thing began wobbling. It felt as if a tire was going out of round. We did not, she said, have time to go back home and swap cars. We were, ahem, riding it out.

After a while we ran over something and the wobbling improved. Later it returned. We stopped to check the tires, but everything seemed OK. And then we ran over something else. We stopped again to discover we hadn’t been hitting things, but rather were slinging rubber from the back passenger tire.

On the side of the freeway, having left home late and running to the airport, we found a tire exposing the steel-belted bits. We’d lost a chunk of tire about the size of your hand. This required a tire change. That required pulling all of the luggage out of the trunk and then the fastest tire change ever. Also, we had to add a bit of air to the tire. Our personal air pumps are a bit slow when you’re watching the clock.

We made it to the park-n-ride shuttle. We hustled through airport security, feeling safe with the oh-so-cursory attempt of security theater taking place — better than too much, I say — and then to the plane. Which was delayed. A flight attendant was late.

Oh, they’d leave you, but for one of their own, they’ll board half the flight, count their crew and then take the passengers off the plane. The flight attendant was late because her flight had not shown up. This happens so frequently they have back-up flight attendants waiting to spring forward and offer you a bag of peanuts.

Now, this trip is one-part conference and we’d done something we’ve never done before, which is to fly into the town on the day of our first role in the festivities. The Yankee had to chair a panel in this afternoon’s sessions, which made the plane and the shuttle to the hotel fun. Our room wasn’t ready. We were hours beyond the checkout time, but people weren’t leaving. The Westin in Boston is just that awesome, apparently.

The Yankee, then, changed into a power suit in the locker room. She broke a locker. And that was just how the day went. But, we made it here. She got to her panel on time. We had dinner with friends — her dissertation chair, who is also on my dissertation committee and a guy I went to Auburn with who’s now working toward his PhD at North Carolina — at a place called Dry Dock Cafe. It feels like a restaurant in a mall, but the soup and salad and crabcakes are great. Everything else was fried. The appetizer, nothing more than kidney beans, relish, garlic and mayo (all to taste) was wonderful.

And that was the day. We’ll be in Boston over the weekend through the ICA conference and then on to the next part of our long journey. All down hill from here.