What did you expect, I've got an adventurous foodie husband!

So the hubs is big in to making things from scratch - bread, cheese, sausages, grinding his own ground turkey and beef, jerkey, canning fruits and vegetables and broths, making and canning his own pie fillings, you name it.

So it should come as no surprise that when he says, "I'm going to learn to make..." he's going to follow through with it.

The last time the hubs said "I'm going to make.." it ended with pickled ginger.

Yes - pickled sushi ginger.

I was certainly not going to fight this one.

Buying this in the markets is so expensive here, and it would go so well with our sushi bowls that we eat on a very regular basis. So I got to work finding the recipe and method and lo-and-behold - we are loyal homemade pickled ginger makers in this house now! And it's so delicious and so flipping easy.

Local folks - FYI, you can find CHEAP ginger at Price Rite. And if you're lucky to have some great Asian markets near you, it's very cheap at those markets too.

Yeah this isn't sideways on my computer - sorry people!

This recipe came to us from About.com and has now been used maybe 4-5 times in our house. It's perfect!!

Ingredients:
2 lb fresh young ginger 
2 tsps salt
3 cups rice vinegar
2 cups sugar

Preparation:
Wash young ginger root and rub off skin. Slice the ginger thinly and salt them (we do this with the mandolin). Leave salted ginger slices in a bowl for about one hour. Dry the ginger slices with paper towels and put them in a sterilized, heat-resistant container/jar. Mix rice vinegar and sugar in a pan and bring to a boil. Pour the hot mixture of vinegar and sugar over the ginger slices. Cool them. Pickled ginger changes its color to light pink. (If you are using old ginger, it might not turn pink naturally.) Cover the jar and store it in the refrigerator.

The Best Thing We ate in Turkey

We can now make at home!

We had the most delicious eggplant salad in Turkey at this great little family owned restaurant and it left such an impression on us as one of the best things we ate during our trip. I searched for Turkish Eggplant Salad recipes when I came home, coming up with a lot of babaganoush of course! But that was NOT what we had.

Finally, I struck gold with a recipe that had a picture and it looked pretty close to what we ate.

We did a Mediterranean food night the other week and made the eggplant salad, enjoyed some yummy pita (ok store bought) and some grape leaves (also, purchased from a great little restaurant near my office for 3 bucks for a dozen!).

The salad was WONDERFULLY yummy - maybe I added more tomato than what was in it when we had it in Turkey but it was pretty close. I am thinking we may have had it with white eggplants though, as the texture of the eggplant seemed a bit different than what we had. Either way it was still fantastic.

I took a container of it in to work as well and it received rave reviews. This is surely something I think would be great to make this summer when the gardens and farmer's markets are plentiful - it would be great at a cookout with some pitas.

We did like it with the pita, but we had it with this wonderful fluffy light bread in Turkey. Thankfully I had a bit of Italian bread left in the house and we both agreed it was MUCH better with bread than pita, it really gets the juices soaked in and the flavors are stand out much more on bread than pita. But really both are equally yummy!

I hope you enjoy this as much as we did!

Roasted Eggplant Salad

Adapted from Hayriye's Turkish Food and Recipes

2 medium eggplants

1-2 cubanelle peppers (one was PLENTY for us, we're not pepper eaters)

1 tomato, diced - or use some halved/quartered grape tomatoes

1-2 cloves of garlic, minced

¼ cup olive oil

½ lemon’s juice

2-3 sprigs parsley, chopped

1 tsp salt to taste

To prepare the sauce, place lemon juice, olive oil and minced garlic in a wide bowl and whisk to emulsify.

Now, you can roast the eggplants and peppers whole until they are tender, then remove them from the oven, remove the skins, etc. However, I was lazy and just peeled and diced the eggplant and roasted it with some oil and salt in the oven on 425 for about 40 minutes - tossing throughout. For the pepper, I roasted over my gas flame on the stove, then removed the skin, seeds/stem and chopped.

Now about 10 minutes near the end, I added the peppers in to the oven with the eggplant, and 5 minutes to go, I added in the tomato to soften that a bit too - but next time, I would not do that with the tomato - it was certainly more fresh how we had it in Turkey and not cooked.

Once your veggies are roasted (either pre-diced or dicing after they are roasted), toss everything in to the sauce and toss to coat.

Another Tasty Canadian Chip

So we tried another bag of tasty Canadian treats Friday Night.

We stopped in the Humpty Dumpty Factory on PEI to see if they did tours and they didn't but they gave us some free bags of chips for our effort. The BBQ ones Hubs ate on his own and loved them. These we had to try together.

They are MUCH better than a Cheeto. They are made with corn instead of flour and because of that they taste like a cross between a Frito and Dorito. But the cheese is real cheddar cheese instead of fake crap. They are by far the best chip I've eaten aside from those darned Gravy Chips!

Canada Katie, you must bring us some of these when you come to visit next - along with some Curly Wurlies, some Smarties, Gravy Chips, Smoky Bacon Chips...

I wonder why I'm fat??

Adventures in Canadian Eating, Take 3

From PEI, the hubs and I took the ferry and thendrove to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. First off, if you ever have the chance to go to Cape Breton, you must go. It is by far the most beautiful place we have ever visited - and we've both been all over the country and many places in Europe.

Prior to gettin g on the ferry we stopped at a little local vineyard and bought a bottle of the most delicious Wild Blueberry Wine. It was more savory than sweet with very subtle tones and is so going to go well with a nice pice of pork or beef.

Our Ferry ride over introduced us to two delicious Canadian classics. Cows Ice Cream (so natural and delicious!) and more importantly Lays Gravy Flavored Potato Chips. Dear God! How does Lays not sell these in the states. It's supposed to be a take on fries with Putine but in Chip form. It's like a not so spicy or tangy BBQ potato chip. Adam and I spent the rest of the trip going to every market to find bags of these to take home. Finally we found mini bags at some service stations and we took 7 of those back to the states with us.

Hubs Loves him some gravy chips!

Along the potato chip journey we also encountered Smoked Bacon Potato Chips, Roast Chicken Potato Chips, Dill Chips and Dill Pickle Chips and a variety of other flavors we never got the chance to try. We ended up bringing back more potato chips than anything I think.

On our first night in Cape Breton we went to this great restaurant called the Lynwood Inn which was very nice and they had this great locacl musician playing who was like listening to James Taylor.

I had this great salmon that had this wonderful cream sauce that had chopped hard boiled egg in it. With some help from the girls on the Nest What's Cooking board, I think I finally found the closest thing to it - so now I can't wait to make that.

Our 2nd night in Cape Breton, we went to a Ceilidh (pronounced Kay-lee). It was fabulous to hear the great local music live and it was by far one of the most fun things we did on the trip. However, by the time it ended at almost 10 pm most of the restaurants were closed. There was however a little local pizza place open and we decided to get a pizza to take back to the B&B room.

They were out of most of the individual slices, so we were game for a whole pizza. They had this pizza on the menu called Donairs pizza. And we actually saw the guy working there grinding the Donair in the meat grinder. We had no clue what it was but decided not to ask and just order it.

Oh my god so glad we did - it was the best pizza we've ever had - hands down. It was this incredible crust with a creamy garlic sauce, ground donair, onion tomato and cheese. We got our pizza, a quart of milk from the mini mart and ate while watching the olympics in our room with the fire place going.

The pizza, was so divine, that we finally asked in Halifax what Donairs was at a restaurant and we discovered it's a ground spiced beef - like what is used for Gyros meat. So from then on we were on a mission to find Donairs to take back to the states with us. Finally at a little market outside of St. John New Brunswick, we did find some.

So if you get up to Canada, do try some Donair Pizza!!

Cheers!

Adventures in Canadian Eating, Take 2

From New Brunswick we went to PEI. On our first night in PEI we were told we had to try a Lobster Supper. We ended up in New Glasgow for their lobster supper.

I wish we would have had lobster supper for every meal on our trip up there. This was by far the best meal we had in our whole trip in Canada and I was upset on our last night in Canada that we didn't eat something as fun or delicious or exciting.

If you go up to PEI you have to try the New Glasgow Lobster Supper.

You get to pick your meal - just apps and dessert, lobster, fish, etc. It comes with bread, chowder or soup, all you can eat mussels and chowder, your lobster and all you can eat desserts.

Now, I enjoy mussels but it's hard to get good, fresh tasting mussels out here. But I figured, Man we're IN PEI I can't not have them. I didn't think hubs would eat them at all, but alas, he did and we had to go through two big buckets or more to get our love worth. They were the best mussels we've ever had and I would move to PEI just for the mussels.

It was more food than I could ever imagine - but the seafood chowder was incredible. The mussels, so good, and the lobster - like buttah baby. Sweeter than lobster that we get in RI to say the least - hence we haven't had lobster since we got home.

Here's the hubs with with this mussels.

MMMMM Seafood!!

The second night in PEI we tried a different lobster supper - the Fisherman's Wharf - and it was still good but we went with the PEI Snow Crab that night - a nice treat since we don't get snow crab down here at all. The crab was good, but I should have had lobster. Again more mussels than you could shake a stick at - but you had to fight off the crazy bus loads of tourists taking buckets of mussels. So a different experience. The New Glasgow one is a more sit down and relax night.

Oh and here's the hubs with the lobster who eats tourists - we found him upon our arrival in PEI. His name is Lorenzo Lobster - if you make it to PEI say hello! But don't get eaten!

Adventures in Canadian Eating, Take 1

So Hubby and I went up to Canada the other week for a nice long vacation. We started in New Brunswick - so that's where this post will start.

In NB, visiting our good friends, we went to the city market on Saturday. There were so many delicious sights and smells and flavors it was so sad we did that first and not on our way back to the states - we would have come home with much more!

Here's the market!





While there, we bought some fresh garlic. We have a friend whose family goes up to Canada to work on a garlic farm each summer - they get free room and board in exchange for their labor and they get a ton of garlic to take home and they always bring us a few bulbs. Each year we use one and then we plant the others in our garden to harvest in the late summer. So while confronted with this great local garlic that smelled divine... we had to buy some of our own. We spent the rest of the trip drying it out in the back window of the car, and it made us crave Italian food the whole trip!


While at the market, I saw a sign for dulse.

I grabbed the hubs and we spoke with the vendor who let us sample some. It's a sea vegetable, like seaweed or kelp that is dried on the rocks. It's got a VERY strong fishy/oceany/sea flavor. Being from the coast out here, I didn't think it would bother me but I couldn't stand it, it was so chewy, tough and strong. Hubs however, loved the dulse so he had to buy a bag to bring home with him.

I let Adam enjoy his dulse while I picked out a great local strawberry and basil vinegar that is just out of this world delicious!

Aside from the excitement, the neatest thing was waiting in line to buy our vinegar, we were behind a French Family (Ok maybe they were from Quebec) but they spoke all in French and they ordered du jambon... oooo du jambon - hubs and I were in heaven with the French - Jambon is one of our favorite French words. For those non Francais speakers - Jambon is Ham.

My New Favorite Candy

I bought a candy up in Canada when we were there the other week ( along with the plothera of other food related items we brought back with us!) and OMG it's divine.

It's the Curly Wurly from Cadbury. It's caramel and chocolate - that's it. No fancy bells and whistles. Just pure good chocolate and rich, sticky caramel - and it's thin and delicious. It's the most perfect balance of sweet, sticky and a little salty.

I'm so buying a case online!!!