New Recipe Week

Our last blog post was all about getting out of our regular dinner routine by doing a week of all Thai food recipes. After a few weeks of returning to some of our favorite dishes, we decided to be a little adventurous again by trying a new recipe each night for a week. We are both inspired by our mothers who bravely approach new recipes much of the time when they have company over. Conventional wisdom would say they are crazy, and they would be better off preparing something they know they can make well. But not our mothers! They say that having company over is the perfect opportunity to try a new recipe because if it fails, they can simply blame it on the recipe! We hoped we wouldn't have to make any excuses this week and fortunately I'd say we came out on top. Whether you're having company over or not, we hope you give at least one of these a try!

New Recipie #1

Teriyaki Salmon with Sriracha Cream Sauce found on Pintrest via http://damndelicious.net/.  

I'm sure many of you have seen those websites that highlight all the "Pinterest Fails" - those attempts to recreate a pinterest masterpiece that end up looking nothing like the original. Shown here first is the Pinterest inspiration, then our work.

Our attempt:

We definitely could have done a better job with the cream sauce and garnish. But at least it was really tasty!

 New Recipie #2

Asparagus Frittata with Mint and Parmesan via The New Best Recipe cookbook.  

We mentioned this cookbook in our last blog and it really is amazing!  Every recipe in this book is well tested and perfected!  The mint and parmesan work so well together in this recipe to lighten it up and give a bright, fresh taste.

 

New Recepie #3

Grilled Ginger-Sesame Chicken Chopped Salad via http://www.cookingclassy.com.  

We did more shopping at K&S for all the lovely fresh produce for this recipe; ginger, green onions, cilantro, and napa cabbage. It was a little flash back to our Thai week and it was awesome.

 

New Recipe #4

Spicy Black Bean Soup. 

 We've both been quite fond of black beans for a while and when we came across this recipe, we knew we had to try it. It also gave us an opportunity to use one of our favorite cheeses at the moment, queso fresco. Queso fresco is a mild, crumbly cheese that is often crumbled and served over the top of your Mexican food. This turned out amazing, spicy and delicious.  Just saute the veggies, add the remaining ingredients and then use an immersion blender to smooth it out.  We served it with cheese quesadillas.  This was Heather's favorite new recipe we tried!

New Recipe #5 

Stuffing Waffles.  

You read that right. We made stuffing and then put it in the waffle maker.  This idea came from an episode of Diners Drive-ins and Dives.  The idea was so outlandish, so fantastic, so interesting, we just had to try it!  These turned out really great (how could they not?) and we served them with chicken (seasoned with herbs de provence), green beans and cranberry sauce.

And there ya have it! Five new recipes in one week! We had a lot of fun trying these and we hope you'll try one too. This may be it for food blogs for now. At the moment, we're working on a 30-step photography challenge that you'll be able to follow on our Instagram pages. Until next time!

Taste of Thai: Part 2

Welcome back to episode two of Taste of Thai! Last time, we put together two of our three favorite Thai dishes and both turned out really great. Pad Thai is probably the dish we make most often, and the Thai peanut chicken pizza is one of our newer favorites. We also finally came across a great peanut sauce recipe that we can't wait to refine and make again! So far so good!

Here are most of the ingredients we had at the beginning of the week.

Dinner on Friday is reserved for happy hour each week, so our goal was to make it from Sunday through Thursday. With Sunday and Monday covered in the last episode, we'll pick up with Tuesday's dinner. Massaman curry was up next on the menu and we have been making this dish for several years. If you've never made curry before, and you're hoping to have something like what is served at a Thai restaurant, the key is not curry powder. Curry powder is great in Indian food, and I like to add a pinch to my sloppy joes, but what you're really looking for is curry paste. You can buy curry paste for massaman, red, green, and sour red curry. And I'm sure there are others too!

This massaman curry paste is a fantastic, flavorful foundation to the dish. It is made of shallot, dried red chili, garlic, lemongrass, galangal (similar to ginger), cinnamon, cardamom, coriander, and cumin. After sauteeing some paste in vegetable oil for a few minutes, add coconut milk (have I mentioned that is one of my favorite things at the moment??), chicken, potato, onion, pad thai sauce, peanut butter, roasted peanut, brown sugar, and fish sauce.

I told Heather there would only be enough for me.

Just kidding!

Our version tends to come out a bit thicker and creamier than the ones you see if you search online for pictures. Ours is also a bit less "rustic" looking as some versions use quartered potatoes instead of cubed, and whole chicken drumsticks and other large cuts. We've only ever used chicken but I imagine it would also be delicious with beef.

Wednesday is my day to work late at the VA, so we wanted to have something fairly quick and simple. Perfect day for spring rolls! Definitely not a complicated thing to put together, and it gave us the perfect opportunity to polish off our tasty peanut sauce.

Heather got things started before I got home so I didn't get any pictures of the assembly process, but I'm sure you can imagine it. We use round spring roll wrappers from the asian grocery store. They just need to be soaked in warm water for 10-20 seconds to make them pliable. Then, add shredded carrot, lettuce, shrimp, ride noodles, and cilantro.

Nothing to it!

For our last Thai meal of the week we decided to try something entirely new. This box caught our eye at World Market and we thought we'd give it a try.

Seemed simple enough. Cook the noodles, add some chicken, onion, included coconut powder and curry paste, add vegetable, etc.

Unfortunately, the included sauce was very salty and way too fishy. We diluted it as much as possible, and tried to keep the sauce to a minimum when we dished up our portions.

Not yum...

And this concludes our taste of Thai! You can probably tell that our two favorite thai flavors to cook with are peanut and coconut. Obviously this isn't a representative look at thai food and I'm sure there are tons and tons of fantastic dishes that we don't know about, or haven't had the huevos to try yet.

Our plan is to go back to our "regular" menu for this week, and next week we're going to do 5 new dishes in a row! That should be a fun way to bring you something interesting to read about as many of the dishes will hopefully be new to you as well. Plus. we won't be stuck with a single ethnicity for a week. We hope you enjoyed reading about our adventures and are really looking forward to posting again in a couple weeks!

Until then, happy eating and happy living!

Taste of Thai: Part 1

And we're back! Not wanting to upset anyone who only cares for a blog post every 6-9 months, we've paused to let you all recover from our last post to bring you the latest from the Davis household. Many of our previous posts have had to do with some sort of adventure out of town. This time, we're up to something kind of fun here at our house!

In order to combat the mundanity of our weekly menu planning, we decided to challenge ourselves to see if we could cook Thai food each night for a week. I know, it might sound a bit strange to combat mundanity with a menu entirely of one country, but we love Thai food and were curious to see how the week would go. So let's get started, beginning with dinner last night.

Pad Thai

We've been making this dish since we first got married. I was introduced to this dish at a number of fantastic Thai restaurants in Bellingham while I lived there during undergrad. I lived in an apartment for two years just down the street from a restaurant called Busara. Being a college student living with two other guys, we tended to enjoy not cooking as much as anybody else. In the years since, I've always used Pad Thai as a metric for how much I like any Thai restaurant. Fortunately, the closest restaurant to our current home in Nashville serves a fantastic Pad Thai! As we've mentioned before on this blog, we really enjoy trying to recreate our favorite restaurant dishes at home. So yesterday, we whipped up another batch of our favorite noodle dish.

We got our recipe from the 1,000+ page cookbook called The New Best Recipe from the Editors of Cooks Illustrated. Yes. You want to click the link and buy the book. Best $20 you can spend for your kitchen. It's perhaps best described as a modern-day Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. Not in the sense of being a complete work of one country's food, but in the astonishing thoroughness of the recipes. They don't just provide a recipe and instructions for Pasta with Bolognese Sauce. No. They write 4 pages on their experiences making the dish with celery, onion, and carrot, and then describe the issues with including celery. Then they describe the flavor without including celery. Painstaking, much? The front cover boasts that they made 38 versions of creme caramel in order to find the best one! Julia Child was of the same caliber of dedication in the name of best serving the home cook. Love it! The first two sentences of the Pad Thai recipe are "Pad Thai is a remedy for a dead, jaded palate. Hot, sweet, and pungent Thai flavors tangled in an un-Western jumble of textures awaken all of the senses that have grown weary of the usual grub." So true!

We've made their recipe several times and have adjusted it over time for our tastes. Here's what we include:

Onion (or shallot)
minced garlic
medium rice noodles
chicken (seasoned with salt and pepper, diced)
egg
pad thai sauce (or tamarind sauce)
rice vinegar
fish sauce
brown or palm sugar
crushed peanuts
bean sprouts
lime juice


And here's what it looks like!

YUM

Keeping things moving, tonight (Monday) we made Thai chicken pizza. This recipe comes from Pioneer Woman and I don't think we've changed anything on it yet. The interesting thing about this recipe is that we successfully made our own peanut sauce for the first time this week! We've tried to make peanut sauce before from a few different recipes online and they were all awful. They just tasted like peanut butter, and lacked the wonderful richness of the stuff we get at our Thai restaurant down the road, Golden Thai. There's a lady at the restaurant that knows if Heather walks in without me, she's there to buy a small container of peanut sauce. "Why don't you just make it at home?" she asks. "It's really easy!" Look lady, we'd tried it. It didn't work. We want to give you money for yours. K? Thanks. :)

Gone are those days because Heather found this recipe on Pinterest and we decided to give it a try. Here's what's included in the peanut sauce, plus sesame oil:

Gotta be one of the most wonderful sauces we know! And after a slight adjustment (less ginger, add cayenne pepper, slightly more coconut milk, slightly less peanut butter) it should be exactly the same as at the restaurant.

We made the peanut sauce, in part, for tonight's pizza and also as a dip for a dish later in the week.

For the pizza, we use a store bought pizza dough. After pre-baking it, we cover it in a thin layer of sweet chili sauce. Mozzarella cheese and diced chicken go on top and the pizza is baked the rest of the way.  We buy many these ingredients like the coconut milk, sweet chili sauce, fish sauce, pad thai sauce, and noodles at a local Asian grocery store called K&S on Charlotte Pike. It's fantastic!! Buying products there definitely helps get you closer to the authentic flavors of the restaurant.

After topping it off with bean sprouts, carrot, cilantro, and a drizzle of peanut sauce, it's ready!

YUM again

So we're two days in and still loving Thai food! We'll be back in a day or two with a couple more dishes!

All the news that fit to blog

Well blogosphere, I think enough time has passed and we're due for a new blog post. We've been up to a couple different things lately including an adventure to North Carolina to visit the largest home in the United States and a car buying adventure! We hope you have a few minutes to rest, relax, and enjoy this post.

Many of you probably remember that great 1994 classic film featuring Macaulay Culkin called Richie Rich and the rather spectacular shots of the huge fountain outside a magnificently huge house. I guess you can imagine where I'm going with this... yes, the house is real, it's called the Biltmore Estate, and it's located in Asheville, North Carolina. Don't stop reading to look it up on Wikipedia! Here's the cool stats for you: Built by George Washington Vanderbilt II (grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the great shipping magnate who founded Vanderbilt University) between 1895-1891. It includes 250 rooms and 178,926 square feet! It is replete with the fountain in the entrance, but despite a thorough search, Mount Richmore could not be located. Needless to say, we were pretty excited to be there! The house has such an incredible history and awesome presence. With no expense spared, and only the finest craftsmen employed, the estate is a remarkable example of what would be done at the time with steel, stone, wood, and lots and lots of skill.

We took an audio-guided tour of the house which took about 2 hours to complete. We didn't see all of it, but we saw enough! Sadly, they don't allow pictures to be taken of the interior, so you'll just have to go and see it for yourself. Tickets aren't cheap (around $50), but it really is worth it. Going through the estate takes you back in time and keeps your mouth wide open in amazement of the scale and detail in each room. One example is a long room which was designed solely for the feature of 5 flemish tapestries from the 1530s. Each is about 15' square and took 10 years to make. Another favorite room was the library. It holds nearly half of Mr. Vanderbilt's 23,000-volume collection. The size of the room was set so that the 1720s painting by Giovanni Pellegrini called The Chariot of Aurora would fit perfectly on the ceiling.

Hand-carved stone and wood predominate inside and outside the house. All of which were detailed, ornate, interesting, and perfect.

So, I guess you could say it was on the impressive side of things. :)

Less impressive, are our two cars. They provide basic transportation, which is exactly all we've needed for the last few years. But as many of you know, we've been searching for a new car for the last year or so. As many of you also know, we definitely tend to think a lot before making decisions, especially ones with such a large financial impact. Lord help us when it comes to buying our first house!! We had been focusing, mostly, on the Chevy Camaro up until a couple months ago. We decided we should probably go test drive a Mustang and give it a fair shot, although we were lusting mostly after the sharp looks of the Chevy at the time. Surprisingly,we really enjoyed the Mustang and started to look into the available options, pricing, etc. As time went on and after a somewhat disappointing test drive of a Camaro, we settled on a Mustang and a particular set of features. Unfortunately, this combination proved to be quite rare and we could only locate a small handful of these cars in the country. The closest was in Wisconsin and it turned out to be quite a bit cheaper if we could go get it, rather than having a local dealer have it shipped here. So bright and early yesterday morning, I got on a plane to Milwaukee to go pick up our new car. After driving the car and looking it over (drooling), I signed on the dotted line and drove away! About 12 hours later, I pulled into our driveway to seal the deal on a long, but very exciting day. Most if not all of you have already seen a picture of the car, but here are a couple more just in case.

We're looking forward to enjoying this car for many years to come!

Anybody in the market for a 1998 Toyota Corolla? :)

Until next time...

Burgess Falls and the American Museum of Science and Energy

Well hello blogosphere! It's time for another episode of "what have Tim and Heather been up to lately"! Probably our favorite things to write about are our little weekend trips around the area. Last time we wrote about a nice trip to Pensacola, FL for our 5th anniversary. One of the most popular posts we've written so far covered a trip to the Jack Daniel's Distillery in nearby Lynchburg, TN. This weekend, we decided to spend our Saturday exploring to the east of Nashville. Our main target was Oak Ridge, TN which was home to the development of enriched Uranium during the Manhattan Project in the 1940's. With Heather's interest in women's history and my interest in military history, it was sure to be a hit! We also decided to take a quick detour on our way to Oak Ridge to check out Burgess State Park. Overall it was a very fun day and should make a good blog post! With that, I hope you enjoy reading about and seeing pictures of our fun little weekend. As usual, it's a pretty long post.  :)


We started off this road trip like we start every road trip... with an egg McMuffin. 'Cause lets be real, there's hardly anything more delicious and convenient for the start of a road trip than that! The weather was pristine, traffic was light, our stomachs were full, and the day was ours to enjoy! We took I-40 East for about 60 miles and turned south in Cookeville. After just another 15 miles through the sticks, we made it to Burgess Falls State Park. As you can imagine, the main attraction is a series of waterfalls on a small river.

We were greeted at the beginning of the walk by this sign which cautioned of a "strenuous hike".

Fortunately, the hike wasn't too bad. The part of the trail that was actually considered strenuous was a series of switchbacks at the end of the trail that we avoided. One of the best parts of the walk was that the waterfalls (a series of 3) got progressively bigger as we went along. It would have been such a bummer to go the other way!

Ok Ok, so a pristine glacial run-off it's not. But hey, we gotta take what we can get here in Tennessee!

The map had the audacity to list the "bridge" in the picture below as a shortcut to the end of the trail. How about NO...

The trail was riddled with tortuous roots like the ones here. At this point we were thinking that maybe by "strenuous" they meant "easy to dodge and pretty to photograph roots on trail"

Making the trail fairly muddy at times were these small but beautiful trickling streams.

After a 20-minute hike, we made it to "middle falls". As I'm sure all of you know, one of the most wonderful things about a waterfall is the sound. It's so incredible to see tremendous volumes of water pouring over a ledge with massive energy, and the whooshing sound that accompanies it just adds so much to the powerful presence of the scene.

Obviously this video doesn't do either the video or the audio experience any justice, but it's the best we can do!

After enjoying that view for a few minutes, we continued on towards the "big falls". Fortunately, the name was appropriate and we got quite a view!

My favorite part about this waterfall was the mist that shot out at the bottom. It made a nice rainbow that I hope you can see in the video. It's probably best to watch this on full screen!

We walked back to our car and drove further east to Oak Ridge. It's a fascinating city that came about in 1942 as a part of the Manhattan Project which was the name for the Federal operation to develop the atomic bomb. I can't give you a history lesson that is any better than what is on Wikipedia, so I'll just link to that page for those of you that are interested.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge,_Tennessee

For those who ain't got time for that, the city was established as the location for the refinement of Uranium-238 (a stable, non-radioactive element) into Uranium-235, a very rare, very radioactive isotope that we hoped would allow for nuclear fission. Only about 0.7% of the Uranium on earth is of the 235 isotope variety. Refinement was expensive and required tons of man-power. Sorry, man and woman-power. In fact, the city which started out as little more than some scattered farms was transformed into a super-secret city of over 75,000 people in 3 years. The Uranium that was enriched here went on to be used in the "Little Boy" bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Impressively, less than a kilogram of Uranium-235 underwent fission which resulted in an explosion with an equivalent yield of 32,000,000 pounds of TNT.

So it is in the wake of the incredible history of this city that the American Museum of Science and Energy exists. Not surprisingly then, a substantial portion of the museum is dedicated to telling the story of Oak Ridge in the 1940's.

A large portion of the museum was pictures and text. Aka, not the best blog material. Sorry.

But there were quite a few cool artifacts like this book of coffee ration tickets!

Heather is at the controls of a calutron. It was a device that used magnetic fields to separate the different Uranium isotopes.

Here's a picture of several calutrons being monitored. In total, there were over 1,100 of these machines in Oak Ridge. Amazingly, these women were recruited and trained for this job without being told what they were doing. They were just instructed to monitor the gauges and make sure the dial stayed between fixed values. If something went wrong, they could make adjustments. It wasn't until after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan that many workers realized what exactly they had been working on.

This was both Heather's and my favorite picture taken by photographer Ed Westcott.

They had one of the actual houses on display! This example is 24' square and is a 2-bed 1-bath arrangement. Over 1,600 of this particular model were built at a cost of $3,500 each.

After learning everything we could about the city of Oak Ridge, it was time to go upstairs for some quality science shenanigans!

After we finished at the museum, we grabbed a bite at the most incredible pizza place, called Big Ed's Pizza. Seriously, we've been thinking about that place all day! If you're ever on I-40 between Nashville and Knoxville, it's definitely worth your while to head into Oak Ridge for a pizza.

And that concluded our Saturday! We've been inspired by our friend Bob who made a bucket list of things to do in Nashville before he moves to California this Spring. We've made our own list and will surely be including some of these things here as we cross them off our own list. The weather was a perfect 65 degrees today without a cloud in the sky. After surviving a few doses of polar vortices, I think we can speak for most people when we say we're truly looking forward to Spring. Draco is going to have surgery on Wednesday to hopefully remove a pretty big growth on his side. Be looking for a post about him in the coming weeks!

With that, we hope you enjoyed reading our stories and that this blog finds you well as always. Until next time...