I've been sick the past couple of days so it's kind of thrown me off. I almost never get sick, not sick enough to stay home from work anyway and if I do get sick it's usually after the nasty, little bug has worked its way through the rest of the family first and I get a touch as it's on it's way out. Not this time! No, this time it came on fast, knocked me on my ass and took no prisoners. No one else is sick. Just me! But I'm on the mend, might even make it to boot camp tomorrow morning. I haven't done any training all week.
So anyway, enough whining. Let's talk food!
I'm not going to go through the whole day-by-day breakdown I'm just going to give you the highlights.
The weekend of May 20th found my honey and I once again wandering the stalls of the local Vancouver Farmer's Market. It's still pretty early for much in the way of local produce. Really, asparagus is about all we've got going right now. A few weeks ago I asked one of the farmers how much longer we could expect to see the local asparagus and he told me about 3 weeks. Well, that was about 3 weeks ago so I knew that my chances for making pickled asparagus were running out. Dan and I picked over all of the bundles of asparagus and picked out two bunches that had uniformly sized spears and tightly closed heads. We also found some garlic scapes that one of the vendors were selling and bought a bunch of those too.
Once we got our bounty home, I washed and blanched the spears and then trimmed them so that they would fit standing up in a half pint jar. I tucked a couple of the scapes in each jar as well as several cloves of garlic.
Meanwhile, I combined all of my pickling spices, vinegar and water in a pan and brought it to a boil.
I'd never made pickled asparagus before and I was out of pickling spice mix so I just kind of made it up as I went along. I looked up several recipes and used then as a starting point. I figured that as long my brine had enough salt and vinegar (but not too much, I've had bad pickle experiences...) I should be fine. I am pretty pleased with the final product over all. The heat processing messed with the pretty green color of the asparagus but the flavor is very good.
The past week included a number of dishes involving ground meat. I never really cooked all that much with ground meat. Maybe once or twice a month it would find it's way into a meal; taco meat, meatballs, Mediterranean rice... Since making the change to Primal/Paleo eating ground meat is much more common. For one, it's cheaper than most other cuts of meat and it's very versatile.
OK, so I know it's not food related but this is a fabulous picture of my BFF. We staged a full scale home invasion on her and her family this past Memorial Day Weekend! I love her!!
One of the big hits this past Memorial Day weekend was Scotch eggs. For those of you that don't know, Scotch eggs are hard-boiled eggs wrapped in sausage. They are a common pub snack in the UK. Usually they are rolled in breadcrumbs and then deep-fried. My Scotch eggs were rolled in pulverized pork rinds and then baked. Some of the larger meat wads contain duck eggs. I know it sounds weird but it's totally delicious!
Remember how I said I trimmed the asparagus so it would fit in the jars? I cooked up those ends and ate them for breakfast along with some German meatballs. Yumm!
More German meatballs served with braised cabbage and oven-roasted sweet potatoes and good old steak and eggs!
And finally, here's a picture of Mr. M with his Children's Culture Parade project. I drug my sick butt out of bed so that I could go to his school and see all of the kids' projects. He chose Chile because he read that there are a lot of feral dogs that roam the streets of Santiago. As good a reason as any!
