Hiya Folks ♥
It’s time! Time for hubby and me to go on vacation~ Starting tomorrow, we will spend a whole week enjoying ourselves on the beautiful island of Madeira, taking in as much of the stunning landscapes, rich history and delicious portugese food as we can possibly manage! So, for once, I will not be adding new recipes on wednesday and the following sunday – time for you guys to catch up and mentally prepare yourselves for the – hopefully…? most likely! – bulging bags of new ideas I will be bringing back home with me~
So, no worries if you don’t see something new pop up here until Oct. 5th – I will be back~!
If, however, you don’t see my Cedri-Lemon Special Part #2 pop up around the usual time… Did you know that the Madeiran Airport is one of the favourite Worst Case Scenarios during Simulator Flight Training for airlines all across the globe? *gulp* No, no. No! I love to fly and a nightmarish runway on stilts cozying up to a huge cliff will not give me the creeps! Huzzah!
See you soon~!
♥
As you can imagine, limited access to something calls for a to-do list, allowing for a somewhat organized pounce on the rare occasion. In my case, that „something“ is, of course, an oven, and of course I have a to-do list slowly growing to the length of Gandalf’s beard. Honestly, at some point, I’m going to buy a kitchen… and build a hourse around it. Anyways, a large chunk of the items on said to-do list has been added to it by the Tyrian Chef’s Guild – from savoury casseroles all the way down to soufflés, there’s just so~oo many oven-yummies waiting to be brought to this side of the screen~!
On our usual Saturday trip to the farmer’s market a couple of weeks ago, I was over the moon as something really large, round’ish and pale yellow blinked at me from one of the large displays of beautyful produce. Since our summer this year, with the exception of 3 horrendously intense heatwaves of 2-3 days each, was cold and wet enough for most of our regional yumtastic mushrooms to start shooting up 2 months early, I half expected those pretty-in-yellow balls roughly the size of my head to be early quinces. Quinces are one of those seasonal things, like asparagus, I look forward to all year in a ticking-days-off-the-calendar-kind of way, I simply love them.
It’s mushroom season! Stores and markets around town are finally showing off wonderful displays of the huge variety of mushrooms growing in our forests this time of the year. After a couple of sneak-peeks into the matter, a handful of chanterelles as salad toppings here and there, just to name one, I decided to officially kick off mushroom season in my kitchen two or three weeks ago. With that idea in mind I purposefully hoofed to the next best farmers market to pick out some pretties for I-don’t-know-yet-but-there-will-be-mushrooms-in-it – just to pull out blanks as I was facing the somewhat overwhelming display of different options.
Like I’ve told you guys already, I’m not really the sweets & junk food kind of girl, but there’s one thing, one oh-so insignificant product, I’m having my fair share of trouble to resist. A product that has been widely unavailable and unknown in these parts of the country during most of my early childhood, despite the masses of american soldiers still stationed here at the time – Peanutbutter.
Just a couple of months ago, when I was going through the Soup section of the Tyrian menu, I realized that, as much as I love beets, I’ve never, at least not that I’m aware of it, had them in a soup’ish kind of context before. Well that’s one blank that should be filled in sooner rather than later, if you like the pretty purple bulbs, don’t you think? I decided to start the beet’y soup experience with a light and summery gazpacho when, just a couple of days after making GW2-induced beet soup-related plans, the first heatwave of this year’s summer hit the mark, rather than to go with the creamy, soul-food’y recipe I had initially picked out.
This year’s Barbecue Season is, at least for the casuals amongst us, slowly approaching its end. This is causing a huge variety of BBQ’ish goods to flood stores, butcher’s shops and markets like you wouldn’t believe. One thing I’ve encountered in truly obscene amounts recently is Tofu – styled, chem-bombed, colored and shaped to work out as a meat substitute. One ridiculous specimen I’ve found in a store nearby was a brown’ish kind of tofu-goo wrapped around a bone’ish type of theoretically-edible-don’t-worry-about-it, looking like a cartoon version of a drumstick from hell, sporting a label along the lines of: „Almost tastes like real meat! Almost feels like real meat! Even with real skin and bone-marrow substitutes, flavored to almost taste like the real thing!“
Well, well, now that, in theory, summer’s already holding up the door for autumn at the end of august, she suddenly decided to catch up on the last couple of weeks and go out with a bang. Literally. All we can do right now is shadow-hop to the next best ice cream parlor and back again. On one of those trips a couple of days ago, I ordered a specific combination of ice creams in order to taste-test a flavor combination I’ve only seen on the Tyrian Menu up until now, Passionfruit and Raspberry. Totally wow’ed by the burst of deliciously fruity and zingy yum in my bowl, I decided I had to do something with those two lovelies.
Nahdala's Kitchen 