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Yes, Those are Grill Marks on My Pizza

eggplant, green pepper, onion, kalamata, cheddar, roasted chili garlic sauce on the left. eggplant, roasted red pepper, kalamata, salami, mozz, a bit of pesto on the right. something like that.

Above, left: eggplant, green pepper, onion, kalamata, cheddar, roasted chili garlic sauce. Above, right: eggplant, roasted red pepper, kalamata, salami, mozz, a bit of pesto. Or something like that.

And yes I started this post in April and am just finishing it now.

I hate writing, always have. Even hated long division in elementary school. I’ve got to figure out a way to post faster so I’m not absent from this fabulous blog for years at a time!

I have to tell you folks about this now that summer veggies abound; I can’t wait any longer. I’ll be brief with my words, and just post a bunch of subpar pics. Can someone teach me how to make pretty pictures with my camera? 80P perhaps? This summer?

This is so easy and so delicious. You know you want to learn to make grilled pizza after the jump.

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Why Waste Perfectly Good Bacon Grease?

So I was at the ‘real’ grocery store the other day; I don’t go there very often because I do 75% of my food shopping at Tran’s Market. Anyway, whenever I do go I usually stop by the fish counter because I love seafood, but I like to eat it the day I buy it. So I picked up some Haddock, and then I noticed they also had these beautiful creatures called Mahogany Clams in the display.

They have a thick shell like a quahog and similar size, but much more beautiful. I asked the guy about them, and he said that he didn’t know what they were like, but probably good, not very good sellers because people didn’t know what they were. A ringing endorsement.

I live in Maine; apparently we don’t like to try new things here. I asked if they were local and he said he thought so, pretty much all their shellfish is local. And they were 15 cents a piece! Cents, my friends. There was even a little cents sign. Remember the good old “c” with a diagonal line through it? I was sold.

I picked up a dozen and a half.

My plan was to make clams casino, which I had never made, but knew contained bacon. I looked up a bunch of recipes and the common theme was mix some stuff with butter, cook your clams until they just open, put the butter mixture on top with a bit of already cooked bacon and broil until brown. Something about throwing out all that perfectly good bacon grease and then using a bunch of butter just didn’t make sense to me, so my version of bacon-y good mahogany clams casino after the jump.

in Bacon / Cheese / Endless Bacon / Pig 2 comments

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Bake Me, Stuff Me, Eat Me!

Just below are raw Costata Romanesco Zucchini– from our garden, of course.

They are an heirloom zucchini and although the plants produce about half the produce, they taste 10 times as good. I’ve also found I can let them get pretty big, and they are still tender and tasty.

I have been doing a ton of delicious things with these throughout the weeks, but have been short on blogging time. So although there are a bunch of things I want to share with you, I will start with a Baked Stuffed Zuke recipe after the jump.

in Cheese / Recipe / Veggie 10 comments

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Follow the Follower: Is it Chowder?

So, my hubbie brought home a recipe from a coworker one day that was a take off on the Olive Garden‘s “Tuscan Soup”. I am not a frequenter of the Olive Garden, but had already had a recreation of this soup at a friend’s house and enjoyed it thoroughly. We started making it more or less from the recipe and have loved it for over a year now. Sometime in the last couple of months we lost the recipe. So now that I am making it from out of my head, and have tweaked a little here and there, and this last time we made it, the soup came out the best ever, I’m pretending it’s my ~~recipe~~ version.

I will share the deliciousness with you post jump, and you can help me come up with my own name for it and answer the question, “Is it a chowder?”

in Pig / Recipe 4 comments

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What The Fennel?

With BS’s successful citron endeavor behind us, I thought I too would ask “WTF?”

We’ve managed to grow some gorgeous fennel in our garden, but as you can see after the jump, the cuke patch is taking over, and trying to bring the fennel down. It’s harvest time.

I planted this knowing that I like fennel, but am realizing now that it’s go time that I don’t actually know what to do with it. Any ideas folks? I know you’ll come through for me ES readers!

Also some interesting facts about fennel post jump. . .

in Veggie 7 comments

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I Have Crab Cakes, too. . . in Maine

We may be famous for our lobstah up here, but I made some damn good crab cakes with some local Maine crab meat last summer that I’ve been meaning to share with you guys. I was reminded after the post a few weeks back. This is an alteration/combination of a recipe from my mom and some Old Bay inspirations. I didn’t have any Old Bay on hand, but I knew I wanted the flavor in there, so I looked up the ingredients and tossed in most of them proportionate to how much I like each spice.

These are wicked good, better than restaurant! Enough talk, recipe after the jump.

in Recipe 6 comments

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Ain’t Nobody Dope As Me I’m Dressed So Fresh So Spicy

Okay! The first recipe for the first veg harvested from our very own garden this year! I’m so excited! We’ve already been using our radishes for a few weeks on salads, but radishes actually intensify in flavor, and can get pretty spicy the longer you leave them in the ground. Ours were getting quite bitey, and some almost carrot sized, so we needed to harvest them.

Then we needed some way to consume a large amount of spicy radishes, hence the invention of the delicious bounty of goodness pictured above. Looks fabulous, huh?

Recipe after the jump (plus bonus recipe!)

in Recipe / Veggie 3 comments