Sherry – Page 28 – Rosemary and the Goat

Tropical Rum Cream Pie

A smooth and creamy pie with colorful fruits.

How is it possible to have a recipe that I have forgotten for 30 years. Years ago my sister and I put together a cookbook of our favorite recipes and then a few years later we did another one (Two Peas In A Pod). This recipe for Rum Pie was in our first book that we called “Double Delight” (after all we are twins, so a fitting name.)

Recently I was looking through one of our book for a particular recipe we both use to cook and decided to revisit our dessert section and when I saw this recipe I thought “ohhh, I forgot all about you” and how creamy and rummy you tasted; and how good you would be with some beautiful tropical fruits.

We eat a lot of fruit and I’m always looking for different ones to try but always go back to my favorites which are raspberries, kiwi, pineapple, and mango just because the colors are so beautiful together. My first though on what fruits to garnish this pie with was to use tropical fruits but when I looked up the list of tropicals, raspberries didn’t show up and after making that salsa to go with my Spicy Tuna Bowl that had passion fruit and pepino melon (it was good) I didn’t want to go out on a limb again and try a “new” fruit. Some of those tropical fruits, in my opinion, have soft mushy taste that I don’t care for. Ya can’t go wrong with anything with raspberries, mango, pineapple and kiwi.

August 16, 2016 By Sherry

Garnish/ Salads/ Side dish/ Vegetables

Pickled Yellow Squash

Take advantage of your summer harvest.

I’ve been doing a lot of pickling lately; first my roasted yellow pickled beets and now this pickled yellow squash.

Even if you don’t have a garden you can take advantage of finding great deals on produce and then canning some to enjoy in the winter. I didn’t find a great deal at the farmer’s market; their yellow squash was $3.00/lb. I bought one pound of their squash and then went to my HEB and bought 6 lbs. at $.99/lb. Now that’s a deal.

My mother and dad both use to can things. It seemed like it was more my mother canning tomatoes and pickles from my dad’s garden and then after my dad retired they both tried their hand(s) at pickled okra, beets. When they moved over to Reelfoot Lake he even canned some fish he had caught then they would make fish cakes out of the canned fish. Now, I wasn’t too keen on trying that recipe but I’m sure if he made it, it was good.

I’ve canned some marmalade before and some fig jam and even some cognac raisins to serve with cheese. Oh, I forgot, one of my sister’s (Terry) best canned items is her chow chow. It is better than any chow chow you will ever find in a grocery store and when I can get tomatoes for 50 cents a lb. I make some. I have to go to Missouri to get tomatoes at that price.

August 11, 2016 By Sherry

Cookies/Bars/ Dessert

Coconut Chocolate Raspberry Squares

Nestles makes the very best choco-late.

For about 20 years after moving to Texas I catered; I had my first job about a month after moving here for our realtor, then our builder and then for a corporation and after that things picked up and I was most doing corporate work except at Christmas time where I was booked mostly for cocktail parties and I also did showers, weddings, and graduation parties. My favorite party to cater, by far, was a cocktail party because I love little food. It’s a lot more work doing all those little pieces of food but I have always loved to watch people try a lot of different items which you get with that type of party vs a dinner party.

When catering corporate luncheons I had to come up with different recipes for cookies/bars/finger desserts. I could whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies or brownies without even looking at a recipe because I did them so often. I can no longer do that since it has been about 6 years since I have catered anything. That part of my life is in the rear view mirror and was the reason I started food blogging; I missed cooking the food and sharing with others.

When my kids were younger, chocolate chip cookies were their most requested cookie for me to make. One year at one of the school book sales I bought this Nestles book and over the next few years of catering (like 20) I made several favorites from that book.

August 6, 2016 By Sherry

Salads

Tomato and Arugula Salad

All those fresh summer vegetables in one salad.

Don’t you just love the taste of arugula? The peppery taste is delicious mixed with tomatoes and I love it on sandwiches in place of lettuce or sautéed a little bit and put into an omelette.

This salad was another idea I had one night when faced with a refrigerator full of vegetables and a brand new package of arugula and after looking on the internet I found others had beaten me to the punch or should I say, recipe. I used Bobby Flay’s Vinaigrette recipe but my own farm truck list of ingredients for the salad.

There’s nothing better than summer tomatoes and over the 4th of July, my son Paul brought a ton (not actually a ton) of tomatoes to me; so many he made 6 pints of roasted salsa that we can enjoy through the summer. I’m thinking when my husband is in the pool and wants a snack I can go pop open a jar of salsa and serve it to him pool side with some chips (not homemade of course).

I’ve gotten where I only buy English cucumbers, that is unless I can get the small pickling type. I love the deep ridges in the English cucumbers and they don’t have as many seeds on the inside and they looked so pretty in this salad.

August 1, 2016 By Sherry

Dessert/ Desserts

Summer Fruit Shortcake

Shortcake doesn’t have to be just made with strawberries or spongy cakes.

Are you looking for an easy light summer dessert? Look no further than this Summer Fruit Shortcake.

This isn’t make with those little round store-bought shortcakes you get next to the strawberry section of the grocery. Who really likes those anyway once covered with strawberries and the cake turns all mushy.

My daughter, Alexis, made a shortcake once that was like a biscuit and had hard boiled egg yolk as one of the ingredients. That was a very good shortcake and I just discovered that the recipe was first published by James Beard and was one of his mother’s recipes. The hard boiled yolk adds to the richness of the shortcake without making it tough.

This Summer Fruit Shortcake doesn’t have either a biscuit or cake type ingredient but is made the way my mother made shortcake and that is with a pie crust baked to golden crisp perfection and then broken into pieces and put beneath a bunch of summer fruit and topped with some REAL whipped cream.

July 27, 2016 By Sherry

Egg Dishes/ Morning Foods/ Sandwiches

Avocado Toast

Get up, it’s time for breakfast!

Did your mother ever tell you breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Maybe she was right but seems like there are a lot of studies out trying to prove it is not so. Well you can decide for yourself if you want to eat breakfast or not. In my opinion if you don’t eat breakfast you’re going to be even hungrier at lunch time.

We don’t always eat breakfast when we travel; sometimes we just take an early lunch. The day I had Avocado Toast at Willa Jean’s in New Orleans it was for a “late” lunch after visiting the WWII museum. Believe me, by the time I walked to Willa Jeans, I had no trouble eating the whole piece of toast. There are so many creative breakfast ideas I have picked up from restaurants and they have all seem to have changed my opinion on breakfast not being my favorite meal of the day; it still isn’t my favorite but I do have an arsenal of things I like making for breakfast/brunch when we have company.

July 22, 2016 By Sherry

Salads

Salad LÜKE

Loved John Besh’s Salad Luke.

We tried our best to eat as much as we could on a recent trip to New Orleans; and as usual I found several things I wanted to try and make once returning home.

My sister and I both were in speech classes until about 4th grade because we couldn’t pronounce our “r’s” correctly and I’m always flubbing up on pronouncing certain words. One night in New Orleans we had dinner at Luke, one of John Besh’s restaurants. So, all day I’m thinking “now how is this pronounced”. Is it like Lu-kay, or lu-kee or luck. When we were seated that night, the first thing I ask the waiter is how to pronounce Luke and he said “Luke, I don’t know what the two dots are doing over the “U” “. At least I won’t be pronouncing this one wrong again.

Their Salad Luke was such a simple salad but the appeal to me was all in the presentation. The plate had a little puddle of buttermilk dressing, topped with some celery root, golden beets and shreds of carrots, then one leaf of butter lettuce sitting on the plate like a little bowl, then drizzle of dressing then 3 or 4 more stacks of the leaves/dressing, making the stack about 4-5” tall but only about 4 – 5 leaves of lettuce. Very pretty and impressed me enough I couldn’t wait to make my own pickled yellow beets and my own buttermilk dressing.

July 17, 2016 By Sherry

Salads/ Side dish

Pickled Roasted Golden Beets

Love these golden beets!

My husband has always said he doesn’t like beets because they are red and he doesn’t like red food. Now that doesn’t make sense since he does eat catsup, tomatoes, etc. So I decided to make golden beets to use in a salad similar to one I had at Luke’s Restaurant in New Orleans. That recipe will come in a couple of days.

Usually the beets I eat are pickled. For years, that was the only thing I knew to do with a beet. And, of course, they were red beets that I pickled and they bled all over everything and if I wasn’t careful I would end up with a blood-splattered looking top.

After I started this blog I became more adventurous in trying new recipes. I’ve always liked cooking but never really went out on a limb to try different things. Then I tried fried beets once at East Side Kings in Austin and I made them almost immediately after returning home. My French Fried Beets with Japanese Mayonnaise is one of my favorite appetizers; I now cut them in slices and not chunks like ESK make their’s. Then my next adventure in beets was with my Roasted Beet Napoleon; stacks of deliciousness. And, who could pass up my Pink Heart Egg Finger Sandwiches where I used the beet juice to dye my hard-boiled eggs then cut tiny beet hearts as a garnish for the egg sandwich.

July 12, 2016 By Sherry

Appetizers/ HotApp/ Salads/ Side dish

BLT Stacked Tomatoes

One of my favorite foods from Savannah.

Do you find it hard to pass up a fried green tomato? Well I do and while visiting in Savannah back in April I saw them on every menu I looked at along with shrimp and grits and pimento cheese .

I grew up eating fried green tomatoes. My dad had the best garden ever and “organic” before most people even though of growing anything without a lot of pesticides. He made his own garlic spray that he would spray on his plants for bugs and he even hooked up a pump in the lake they lived on (after retirement) and use that water to water his garden.

Over the years of our gardening we would grow all types of tomatoes and I could not wait to see the first green tomatoes get big enough to pick and fry and believe me it was hard to pick them knowing in just a few days we would have beautiful vine ripen tomatoes. But, that was never a hard decision for me to make — pick or not pick.

Have you ever had fried green tomatoes with pimento cheese on top? I haven’t either but saw it on some menus in Savannah. I have posted a Fried Green Tomato with Black Eyed Pea Vinaigrette and a Fried Green Tomato with Ravigote Sauce.

July 7, 2016 By Sherry

Entree/ Fish/Seafood

Paella

My pan overfloweth!

If you are tired of doing BBQ for the 4th of July, why not try a big pan of paella.

My first experience with paella was many years ago in Mexico. After checking into our all-inclusive resort we had a cocktail in hand before even making it to our room. We settled in for a few days of sun, beach and beautiful water. This resort was where I first tasted a white vegetable soup that took me years of searching to come with something similar to what I ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner while in Mexico

One day while we were on the beach, the chef prepared a paella. It wasn’t any ordinary pan of paella either. The fire for cooking this was a big oil drum with flames blazing from the top. The pan was maybe 5′ across and that they perched on top of the flaming barrel. They proceeded to cook the ingredients, and at the end adding in the green peas. As we sat in our chairs on the beach enjoying cocktails that were delivered before we even asked for them, we were salivating at the aroma coming from this gigantic pan and as they slowly picked up the pan to move it to the table to start serving all of us beach goers, THEY DROPPED IT and spilled paella all over the sand. So, we had to wait a little while to taste it since they had to start over from scratch. When we were finally served the dish of paella, it was delicious.

Years later we had some paella in Spain which was just ok (picture below); I thought it was too mushy. Then my son make it here one year for our Spainish feast we did after Thanksgiving and I was just his sous chef. So, I thought it was about time for me to try it on my own.

July 1, 2016 By Sherry

Dessert/ Ice Cream

Buttermilk Ice Cream with Bourbon Peaches and Other Friends

My peach friends are blackberries and blueberries.

Do we ever get tired of ice cream? When it is hot as blazes here in Texas, ice cream is the only thing that will cool you down short of jumping in the swimming pool.

While Blue Bell was taking their break in the ice cream making business, I wouldn’t buy any other brand. If it is not Blue Bell, then I’m going to make my own. And, even when it started showing up on the shelves again, I only wanted to buy their “light” because to me that is their best.

While visiting for a few days in New Orleans recently we were at the World War II museum (great museum) and decided that we could walk to Willa Jean’s for lunch (I thought it was rather a long walk 🙂 ). Wonderful lunch and I will be making a sandwich (sort of) that I had but for dessert we shared their cornbread bread pudding with bourbon and buttermilk ice cream. I didn’t want to attempt the cornbread pudding because it seems a little heavy to be making in the summer. So, I decided to make a buttermilk ice cream with bourbon fruit on the side. Yum, yum. Maybe I’ll do the cornbread bread pudding in the fall when it starts to cool down a bit.

June 26, 2016 By Sherry

Egg Dishes/ Morning Foods

Bacon and Avocado Quesadilla with Egg

Who says quesadillas have to be round anyway!

Just because I don’t have a pair of cowboy boots or don’t own a horse or even a ten gallon hat doesn’t mean I have not been around the stables a few times when it comes to whipping up some good Tex-Mex/Mexican food and this recipe just happens to be for breakfast.

Living in Texas for the past 26 years has made me somewhat of an almost Texan with some pretty good Mexican recipe skills. I like my guacamole hot, my taco shells thin and crisp (only the corn ones Crisp) and I like my beans a little tipsy instead of mashed.

All three of our kids went to UT in Austin and three out of five of our grandsons were born in Texas. We have eaten at so many Mexican restaurants over the years that I can tell from their salsa and chips if we are going to enjoy their food.

I love my pasole soup made with pulled pork and hominy and my homemade tamales are almost as good as my sister’s. I’ve been experimenting with some shrimp nachos recently and a few other types of Mexican treats with a Sherry spin on them; so when I recently came across a bacon and avocado quesadilla on a menu from E & O Food and Drink restaurant in Chicago, I knew I was going to have to give It my Tex-Mex-Sherry tweak.

June 21, 2016 By Sherry

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