Tag Archives: weekend

The Rest of the Weekend Wasn’t Too Shabby

Leave a reply

Picking up where Tom left off with Saturday Mornings, little did we know after he posted that the rest of the weekend would turn out to be so awesome.

Beer

1612er Zwicklbier

After our morning routine, despite the heat we decided to take a walk and headed east. We ended up at Brauhaus Schmitz and enjoyed a few rare German beers. The menu looks promising, so I’m sure we’ll head back there some other time for food.

On the way back, we stopped by Isgro Pastries to pick up a few of their famous cannoli for after dinner. It was our first time trying them, and wow, they were exquisite. The shell was firm and not too crumbly, and the filling was delicious and not too sweet.

Isgro Cannoli

Isgro Cannoli

When we got home, we cooked up some clams that we had picked up earlier in the day from Shore Catch, a vendor that sells fresh sustainable New Jersey day boat seafood at the Rittenhouse Farmers’ Market. We cooked them with chorizo from Di Bruno Brothers, white wine, parsley from our CSA, and of course, tons of garlic.

Clams with Chorizo and White Wine and Garlic

Clams with Chorizo and White Wine and Garlic

On Sunday morning, we started with our usual routine of getting the Sunday paper and reading it at home. We decided to go out for brunch, but we have such a long list of places to try, it’s always so hard to decide. We settled on nearby Marathon Grill. We rarely go there, but the food always pleasantly surprises us when we do. Tom got some delicious whole wheat pancakes with bananas and almonds (the bananas were an homage to our upcoming read of Gravity’s Rainbow), and I got a breakfast burrito. Most of the breakfast burritos I’ve tried in Philly so far have been bland and disappointing, but this one was actually pretty good, made with chorizo, black beans, pepperjack cheese, jalapeño, spinach, and onions, topped with tomatillo salsa.

Breakfast Burrito at Marathon Grill

Breakfast Burrito at Marathon Grill

Our Sunday afternoon was much like our Saturday afternoon. We walked the same direction but this time ended up at Tapestry, a pleasant gastropub. We only had beers, but the cocktails looked well made, as did the food. I’m sure we’ll be back soon.

That night, we cooked up some vegetable enchiladas, for the second week in a row. I’ll post the recipe in a forthcoming post, but for now, here’s a picture:

Enchiladas with Veggies and Black Beans

Enchiladas with Veggies and Black Beans

What a delicious weekend! Let’s do it again!

Tom’s Clam Recipe

1 Reply

I don’t really have A recipe for my clams, just a general method. Basically, I try to balance some spicy things with some sweeter things. This time around, I used garlic, shallots and black and crushed red pepper, and dried chorizo to provide some spice and peas, carrots and fennel for a little sweetness.

I began by frying up the garlic and shallots. I don’t really measure anything but for something like this, I was rather generous, using about 7-8 cloves of garlic and 1 rather large shallot.

I next threw in one chopped carrot, followed by about half a head of chopped fennel. I fried them until they just started to become soft.

Then I added the chopped chorizo, the black and crushed red pepper and some herbs. I usually use basil, thyme and oregano. Again, I tend to be generous with everything for this dish, but it’s all a matter of taste.

Since the chorizo didn’t need to really cook, I just fried everything enough to blend the flavors. Since the clams need to steam in this mixture, I needed to add liquid. I added some clam juice (maybe about 1/4 cup–again, I don’t measure) and about 1/3 a bottle of beer. I used Saison Dupont, which is also quite fine for drinking with the clams.

I let this come to a simmer and then add some frozen peas. I bring it back up to a healthy simmer and then add the clams and cook until they open.

That’s it! Simple and delicious. Pairs very well with lighter beers. We also had a nice multigrain sourdough bagette to dip in the juices.

Adventures in Cheese Steak Making

1 Reply

Despite being a native Philadelphian, or perhaps because of, I don’t have a strong opinion about what a Philadelphia cheese steak is. I know many people have a very strict idea about what ingredients go into a cheese steak, but I have encountered so many variations over the years that I know that variety is a good thing.

I’ve made cheese steaks at home in the past but have not done so in many years. Last week at the Fitler Square Farmers’ Market, we saw that one of the vendors had steak sandwich meat. We already had our cooking plans for last weekend, but we decided that this weekend we would make cheese steaks.

Luckily, that vendor was there and had the meat. We decided to keep things simple this time, with the thought that we’d get the basics down this first time and be more daring in the future. We already had onions on hand from our CSA and mushrooms from last week’s visit to the Rittenhouse Square Farmers’ Market. After getting our meat at the Farmer’s Market, we went to Di Bruno Bros. to get good Provolone. They also carry excellent bread baked at Sarcone’s Bakery.

Making the sandwich is pretty straight-forward. We started by frying the onions and adding the mushrooms after a few minutes.

The chip steak was pretty thin, so we waited until we felt the onions and mushrooms were close to being done before adding the steak. We didn’t season it with anything more than salt and pepper.

There was more meat than we had anticipated and the balance between the onions and mushrooms and the steak wasn’t quite what we had planned for.

We cut the bread into sandwich sized portions and then layered the cheese.

Since the meat was thin, it didn’t take long for it to be done. We quickly transferred the mixture to the rolls. Our hope was that the heat from cooking would melt the cheese, but it didn’t. In the future, we might want to pop the bread and cheese into the oven for a couple of minutes to get the melting started.

We had it with a salad and paired it with The Lost Abbey Serpent’s Stout.

Overall, the sandwiches were quite good if slightly bland. A better balance of onions and mushrooms certainly would have helped as would having the cheese melted. Garlic, of course, never hurts anything. Even thought the meat was nicely done, it might have been a bit on the cold side when we added it to the pan and the initial sizzle died quickly. A hotter pan and/or more room temperature meat could also help. We also talked about marinating the meat in, perhaps, beer.

We had some of the meat, onion and mushroom mixture leftover, so the next morning, we made cheese steak omelets. We jazzed it up by frying up more onions, adding red bell pepper, garlic, and spinach. We pan toasted some of the leftover Sarcone’s bread and had some locally roasted Green Street Organic French Roast coffee.

Weekend Cookin’

Leave a reply

Our Saturday morning routine these days is to walk to the Fitler Square Farmer’s Market and the Rittenhouse Farmer’s Market to pick up a few things to complement our CSA.

From Highland Orchards at Fitler Square, we got a kabocha squash, broccoli, orange bell peppers, and two chicken legs. From Big Sky Bread Bakery, also at Fitler, we got some granola for work-week snacking. Then we walked over to Rittenhouse and got a crimini-shitake mushroom assortment from Davidson Exotics, and some handmade soap from Tassot Apiaries.

I had wanted to get some local goat cheese from one of the vendors at the Rittenhouse Farmer’s Market, but that vendor wasn’t there today, so we walked over to DiBruno Brothers and got a couple different goat cheeses there. I also picked up some locally roasted Green Street coffee at Metropolitan Bakery on the way home.

For dinner Saturday night, we decided to cook up the squash. I really like working with kabocha because it’s easy to cut and you don’t have to peel it (the skin gets nice and carmelized when roasted). I chopped up the kabocha and tossed it with olive oil, cumin, cinnamon, salt, and black pepper, then spread it on a cookie sheet and let it cook in the oven at 375˚ F for 30 minutes. Once it was ready, I just spooned some squash over the winter greens from this week’s CSA, drizzled all that with a little more olive oil, and then topped it with some dollops of goat cheese (for this we used the Pennsylvania Shellbark Sharp that we got earlier today at DiBruno Brothers).

Sunday mornings, we usually like to go to brunch at Sidecar Bar & Grille, but since we knew we were going out later for a cooking class, we decided to stay in for breakfast. Tom created a “mess” of eggs, spinach, garlic, scallions, potatoes, mushrooms, cheese, and red pepper flakes.

The eggs, spinach, scallions, and potatoes were from this week’s CSA, the mushrooms and garlic were from the farmer’s market, and the cheese was a beer-washed “Cabra la Mancha” that we got Saturday morning at DiBruno Brothers. The sourdough bread for our toast also came from the Wild Flour Bakery at the Rittenhouse Farmer’s Market some time back (it keeps well in the freezer). Yum!