Asparagus Tart

Never go to the food store hungry. We know it's tempting, especially when you're hungry and there's not much in the pantry and you've got to cook dinner. Don't do it! Or you'll be like Eric last night, who went to the food store for hamburger meat, buns, cheese and a red onion (we had burgers) and returned with all that, plus a bag of chips and a can of frosting and some beer. 3 hours later we both had stomach aches, half the chips were gone and there was a slightly depleted frosting can. See what happens when you go to the store hungry? We suggest eating a cookie first, to take the edge off. Or have some Asparagus Tart. Whats asparagus tart you ask? It's pretty awesome is what it is. A flaky pastry topped with cheese and caramelized onions and pancetta and asparagus. Yum. This is a perfect party snack or first course (or you can be like us and eat it as a main course)! The asparagus actually makes this a pretty refreshing dish, perfect for when the weather goes from 50* and dumping down rain on the weekend to 80* and sunny by Thursday without prior notice, which is exactly what happened here. Last week, we were buried under enough rain to pull the whole state out of a drought and now it's like summer, complete with Eric's glow in the dark legs seen peeking out from a pair of shorts. Don't look, you might go blind!

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Grandma's Classic Pot Roast

For some reason, pot roast doesn't conjure up images of succulent braised meat bursting with flavor as it falls apart on your fork. Not sure why that is, as that has definitely not been our experience. Maybe it has something to do with how simple and basic a pot roast is. Usually the foods that get the most attention are complex and a great challenge to prepare (soufflé for example). A well made pot roast on the other hand is a prime example of winter time comfort food. The best part is the gravy this makes, there's nothing like a good beef gravy with some mashed potatoes and, well beef. Now since we know that Spring is officially here what are we doing making comfort food? You'd never know spring is here based on the weather we've been having. It has rained for pretty much the last 10 days. Buckets upon buckets upon buckets. Which is good, we've needed it but we've hit that point where enough is enough! We're getting all set to enjoy our backyard and all we've got is rain. At least it's good for the new lawn in the backyard, it's hard to over-water new sod under normal conditions but this rain is pushing it. Actually Eric is more concerned about the dog wrecking the new lawn than he is about the rain. She loves the lawn. Loves it in ways that just aren't healthy for the poor poor grass. That darn pooch is just too smart, she's managed to defeat two different fences Eric has put up around the grass. After first stretching some plastic fencing around some posts he put up at the edge of the lawn, she found that she could just take a running start and bowl right through the fence. It was pretty funny for a minute, until she started running around and pulling up chunks of lawn. Eric was not pleased, so yesterday he pulled out his stock of 2x4s and other wooden planks and set out to really get a solid, dog proof indestructible fence up. Extra layers of fencing, reinforced posts and cross pieces and wrought iron barricades. A whole afternoon of no dog on the lawn, Eric couldn't have been happier. Charisse woke him up this morning and pointed out the bedroom window: there was the dog, in the middle of the lawn, happy as could be. 

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Early Spring Salad With Roasted Garlic Lemonette

Spring is here! Eric was all prepared to talk about how spring will be here really soon and we're doing an Early Spring Salad to celebrate when Charisse pointed out that spring came last weekend. Swing and a miss. At least we got that sorted out before the post. The early spring part apparently has to do with the ingredients we used, spring onions and radishes are among the first crops up for harvest in the new year and they are tasty. Oh yeah, and more lemons in here too from the great lemon harvest of 2011. So what are we doing with Spring officially here, grass growing in the backyard and living in California? Staying inside and working on the stuff around the internets because it's been raining for the last week. Raining hard. The kind of rain that makes you never want to leave the house because you can go from dry under an umbrella, plastic rain coat, parka and sweater (yes, when its 50* and raining thats how you dress around here) to instantly wetter than when you've been in the shower for 20 minutes. So Eric when and gave the blog another face-lift, adding lots of features we've been talking about adding for a while and trying to clean up the general look and feel. 

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Home and Garden: Cheap Finds

We actually get asked a lot about where we get most of our patterned plates and napkins and other awesome kitchen decor for the blog. Truth is that you don't need to spend a bundle to have a variety of items for photography set ups. So today we're going to let you in on our little secret... you ready? This is it... Thrift Stores! Yup, thats right, Goodwill, Savers, garage sales you name it. About once every couple months or so Charisse will sift through our local second hand stores to score a ton of swag for not a lot of money. If you know what you are looking for and have a little knowledge about how to spiff up a used item then you are pretty much guaranteed discover a hidden treasure or two (or five or ten). Actually, not all of our finds are blog related, our favorite over-sized chair and ottoman, our antique dining room set and our trusty kitchen chop block were found at the thrift store, moving sale and craigslist respectively and we didn't pay over $50.00 for any of it! Here's the biggest cooking prize at any thrift store; cast iron cookware! We have talked about how much we adore our growing collection of cast iron skillets but seriously it is Charisse's favorite item in the kitchen hands down and she always seems to run across a skillet here or pot there for around $5.00. Cast iron takes work and effort to maintain and some knowledge of cooking to use properly and most people who buy one don't want to be bothered learning to use it properly, so it gets tossed under all the non-stick cookware and eventually donated. Score for us! Stopping by "Savers" last Friday Charisse came home with a really guilty look... she'd hit the jack pot and found a beautiful 10 inch antique skillet, a 8 inch deep skillet and a Æbleskiver skillet, which is used to make Danish pancake puffs. She also scored a small Graniteware stock pot with lid that was practically new. The guilty look? Charisse brought home about our bajillionth cast iron pot so Eric has to wait until next month to buy his bajillionth camera accessory. A promise of something yummy took care of that situation. Now cookware is awesome, but for the blogger or budding food photographer out there, second hand stores are the BEST place to stock up on textiles, plates, silverware, glasses, and any other staging object for food photography. In the same trip Charisse bought 8 pieces of fabric ranging in price from $.99-$2.00. It's fun to find unique patterns and colors that will really pop in pictures and compliment the food. Furthermore, many items are at these places because they are just that, one item. Who needs 1 patterned plate? 1 funky napkin? We do! So next time your driving by your local thrift store, stop in and do a little digging and see what treasures you can find! 

Champagne Cupcakelettes

"What should we do for dinner?" was the question Charisse asked the other day. "Cupcakes" came the answer. Yup, cupcakes is what Eric came home with a hankering for and letting up on that dream was not on his agenda. As Charisse had a one sided discussion about dinner, Eric sat and surreptitiously dreamed of different kinds of cupcakes. Red velvet, rich chocolate, cream cheese frosting whipped cream frosting, frosting, Mmmmmmm. After almost 20 minutes of "how about a nice homemade salad or some bread pudding?" being answered with "Hmm, no, I don't think those flavors would make a good cupcake" Charisse gave up and threw her recipe book at him and said "Fine! We can have cupcakes for DESSERT!" Eric earned that lump for sure, but the result was one serious cupcake, Champagne Cupcakelettes! Thats right, mini cupcakes with Champagne. These were cause for some serious celebration, so much so we ended up needing another bottle to finish the icing. Okay, so we were actually celebrating the instillation of grass in the backyard, but these little jems are totally worth a celebration in their own right. 

So last week it was 65* and sunny all weekend here in the Bay Area, we put some serious time into the backyard, built a fence for the garden and generally got the backyard moving, Eric also ordered some grass, to be delivered the following Saturday morning. Dan agreed to come over again and help put it in (he helped with the front yard too, he's building up some serious credit for when he finally buys a house) and things were good. By Saturday morning we were in the middle of the biggest storm of the season, hail, ice, gail force winds and a tornado warning (and actual tornado in some parts of the bay). Eric has not the best timing but they got it done, ended up covered in mud and now our backyard has a yard instead of a mud patch reminiscent of a battlefield. Now to only keep the dog off of her newfound playground for two weeks...

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Not Corned Beef and Cabbage Mini Meatball Soup

We set out to create a great St. Patties day post the other day, started poking around, looking for recipes and getting all excited about it (Eric starts playing bagpipe music at his desk starting in early March) but we realized the same the we realize pretty much every year, neither of us are huge fans of Irish food. Irish whiskey? Yes. Irish Beer? Yes. Yes. Fake Irish accents? Yes. Yes. Yes. Irish food? Ehhh not so much. (Charisse says "except stew. I like stew. Put that in there.").  Charisse found the recipe and really wanted to try it out. Eric wanted to drink Guinness and pretend to be Irish. Not surprisingly we did both. It's actually a really tasty soup using Charisse's homemade chicken stock for a base. We made of course, far too much. Even giving it away we ended up freezing a ton of it for a later date. We always make way too much soup for some odd reason, but having too much soup is rarely a problem to complain about. Tomorrow Dan is coming over and we're installing grass in the backyard, which should be a huge improvement over the existing patch of dirt and remnants of the great grass disaster of '09. Grass seed + exposed sprinkler wires + new puppy = disaster. Actually quite a number of things + new puppy equals disaster, though we'll have to get to that another day since the dog just took off with our soup spoon. 

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Jen's Now Famous Almost BBQ Shrimp

Not long ago we raided our friend Jen's recipe book for one that drives both husbands crazy during the non pumpkin season and last weekend decided that one good dish deserves another. Now this one wasn't nearly as famous as the pumpkin pie bars were but when you've got a hankering for shrimp, butter and a big delicious mess this is the one to turn to. If you can think of something better than a buttery shrimpy mess to top off a wildly busy and productive weekend we'd like to know about it! Why was our weekend wild, busy and productive you ask? We're glad that you did! If you remember waaaay back when we started, we go super excited about finally putting grass in the front yard (and no longer looking like the biggest hillbillies on the block). Well now we're only a few days away from being that excited about the back yard! We finally dug in (literally) and executed our plans for the yard. Grass, garden, garden fence, new BBQ, place to put outside stuff. Super excited. Also tired and sore, but excited none the less. We were actually completely wiped out on Sunday from Saturday when it came to chow down with Dan and Jen and our friends Brooke and Scott. Saturday Dan came over and we spent the day building our garden fence, then ran to Charisse's grandmother's 85th birthday party, then hustled off to Eric's hockey game which started at 11pm.

This is him playing on the left, and a tip for all the parents and spouses of hockey players: garage. Outdoor storage. Attic. All are good places to store hockey gear. Living room. Bedroom. Kitchen. All lousy places to store hockey gear because that hockey smell is considered by scientists to be among the worst smells every made by human beings. Eric got re-educated about this once, when after a late game he left his bag infront of the heater in the living room, intending to put it away in the morning. Que morning, wake up, turn on heater, turn on coffee, wash face, gag over awful smell permeating the house. Yuck. Anyways, Saturday was a long busy day and we did more work on Sunday (with slightly less limberness). On Monday it was very, very hard to wake up, but the thought of leftover buttery shrimp for lunch was a big motivator.