feed the blog

When you love clothes and food, what comes first? Both necessities, right?

Here’s what we’ve been up to at every day dress: cooking, baking, feeding:

For bacon egg cheese cups pre-cooked 6 lbs of bacon before coiling them into a lightly sprayed muffin pan. Filled the muffin cups with scrambled eggs, 8 dozen total, and grated cheddar cheese, 3 bricks, three-quarters of the way full. Baked them off in batches in a 350 degree oven and placed them all on two sheet pans to deliver to daughter’s freshman homecoming class breakfast. We love donuts and bagels but protein in the morning is a very good thing.

For small ski town Fall Fest weekend with endless kids and house-guests, we had a ball, started things off last Thursday night by pre-browning 20 lbs of beef short-ribs. Used every pan in site. 🙂 Added to that mixture red onion, garlic, etc. but the kicker was the 96 ounces or 4 large bottles of stout. I never really buy beer and decided to go local and seasonal, therefore the pumking and warlock, couldn’t decide between the two so simply bought both and mixed. Cooked that all up and Friday did 8 lbs of parsnips with cream and butter for the puree. Ran out of heavy cream to get the consistency I wanted and did not want to go back to the grocery so smartly reserved some of the cooking water to thin the mixture out with good flavor.

We had a good mix-up of kids and adults so added the party standard double batch of Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Mac & Cheese. My tip here: when needing a double batch to accommodate a large group, prepare each batch separately and place one into your large oven proof serving piece and then after preparing the second batch dump that directly on top. Finish it all off with sliced tomatoes, and this you can double for sure in one swoop, the pan-fried buttered bread crumbs.

Knowing that one of our  guests does not eat beef and is a total health nut did a dozen organic South Beach Rosemary Balsamic Chicken Breasts. Simple green salad with mustard vinaigrette, bruschetta, and sliced fresh baguettes rounded things out.

Put two daughters and one friend to work on peeling coring and slicing 10 lbs of apples for the oatmeal apple crisp. No photos of that, everyone was way too occupied. 4 cups old-fashioned oats, 4 cups brown sugar, 4 sticks butter, sugar and cinnamon, and with all those apples baked off and served warm with vanilla ice cream there was love in the room.

Friday night was the ribs, Saturday night turned into adult kids grilling burgers with sweet potatoes, salad, and home-made peanut butter cookies kid you not. For some pretty great tasting burgers put the ground beef, ground lamb, and ground pork that were really for meatballs into a big bowl and added some salt pepper and stuff. Put that mixture into a rectangular pan and cut it in rows and then shaped 16 equal burgers. Also roasted two organic chickens for picking and casual Caesar Salad for and then there were four for Monday night dinner home city-side. Oh, Sunday morning, more eggs, more bacon, and this time added pancakes. Sunday night dinner out in local ski town. Exhaustion, hands have burns, no manicure. Slightly manic, totally worth it all.

Yesterday, and today, back to fashion. Tomorrow, Thursday, off to Rochester NY for Fashion Week of Rochester, super excited, and Friday October 18th Fall Winter Trunk Show begins. Let’s go.

xoxo

The blog is fed. 🙂 Every day dress…

Beef Short Ribs and Parsnip Puree | adapted from The Lucky Penny Blog adapted from Smitten Kitchen

Mac & Cheese | adapted from Barefoot Contessa

Balsamic Chicken | adapted from The South Beach Diet