Month: February 2017

This was my breakfast this morning, on a wet sloshy Sunday morning.  I do not believe I have ever made a soft-boiled egg so wanted to try it.  Here are the results:

I used a caraway seed, flax seed, almond meal bread I had made previously for the toast.  I used lingonberry preserves I had in the fridge.  There is a Cabot sharp cheddar I found in the fridge as well.  The bacon and eggs are from the farm.  I used Bengal Spice herb tea because when I went on the porch to look at our mint patch, it looked like this:

But after I had eaten my breakfast I realized I forgot that I had dried spearmint and peppermint last summer.

The meal was great, although I could not finish.  I enjoyed breaking into and eating the soft-boiled egg with the extra yolk dripping onto the toast.  The spiced tea actually was really good with the meal.  I will definitely make this again sometime but smaller portions.  And I will try it with mint tea as well.

This is from the Wall.  It was really good and oniony.  I did substitute white beans for the Fava beans.  I had it with a sharp cheddar and red wine.  Nice winter meal.  

We are celebrating early since I have to work tomorrow.  We are doing a low-key dinner at home.  I based the dinner on King’s Landing.  I made Poudre Forte using the Grains of Paradise I purchased the other day.  Above is the mixture.  In the cookbook there is a great quote about this spice, “Powder-fort…seems to be a mixture likewise of the warmer spices, pepper, ginger &cc pulverized. -THE FORME OF CURY, 14TH CENTURY” With the Poudre Forte I made Roast Boar (but had to substitute pig instead).  Here it is coming out of the oven. To accompany this I made Oatbread.  It has dates and apple bits in it and was actually the best part of the meal (although the pork was good too). We also had Sweetcorn fritters.  These are not sweet and actually did not have a lot of flavor so not that exciting.  

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

P.S. Here is a photo of the Valentine’s dinner plate.

So this was our dinner last night.  I had to substitute Cornish Game Hens for Quail as we could not find any quail in local or even Seattle grocery stores.  There is a quail farm in Whatcom county I could have contacted, but with their ongoing snow issues I did not want to drive there.  The recipe was easy except took a while to make the Elizabethan Butter Sauce.  But the game hens took much longer to cook than the recipe states.  I had them in the oven 30 minutes, and they still were not done thoroughly.  Here is the dinner plate.

The bird was OK but nothing special.  Not much flavor or spices.  Maybe with quail it would be more interesting.  So if I can find quail I might try it again.  I do not think we will be raising quail after our pheasant raising experiences.

So some of my unusual spices arrived in the mail today.  They are Grains of Paradise, Long Pepper and crushed Allepo Chili Peppers. I am excited to try them out.

I made this today for lunch and some extra for upcoming lunches. These ingredients we cannot grow on our farm, especially this time of year so Tom went out to local stores to find the ingredients.  It came out really good.

This was a King’s Landing recipe.  It was a refreshing change to have a bit of summer in the middle of winter.  I had it with some iced golden plum wine.