went to Cask and Larder Sunday on our way out of town for the Christmas holidays to treat ourselves to their luscious pastries and yummy bites for breakfast. I started with the crazy spiciest bloody Mary – garnished with an olive, sausage chunk, pickle and a lime wedge. Crazy I tell you. I think I kind of don’t love that vinegar spice thing in my morning beverage choice but it was fun to try it. I had little black pepper biscuits and gravy for my main primarily because I wanted to try that gravy. Ok, but the pastry board was all kinds of deliciousness. A bananas foster profiterole with serious crisp thin shell and filled with rummy banana cream. A savory cheddar scone with HAM (!?) butter. A tiny preserved pear and cranberry muffin with orange butter. But the very best bite of the day by far was a tiny bite sized apple fritter with apple cider glaze. CRAZY amazing. Who even knows how they do that. I want one now.
bar americain – pizza
Bobby Flay never fails to deliver. We tweaked a pizza recipe out of Bar American for a caramelized onion, gruyere, garlic oil and bacon pizza by using a Stonefire brand flatbread crust. The rest of the recipe was fairly involved with cheffy steps so we opted for the flatbread premade for ease of actually eating at a reasonable hour. I have to say that we really enjoy the two Stonefire products available to us here in central Florida. Onions caramelize for 45 minutes down to a consistently that is almost saucelike and substitute as such for the base of the pizza. Smothering with gruyere and then sprinkling bacon lardons, garlic chips, and parsley oil over the top creates a great take on home baked pizza.We piled on arugula to round it out as a dinner and ate it all with a knife and fork.
I’ve included a more basic recipe here but if you love great food Bar Americain is full of easy but impressive recipes.
aunty’s – written in may – never posted
there isn’t a great deal of variety in our local supermarket shopping scene. Within 20 minutes of our house I think there are only two and both are Publix. Publix is a local market that promotes from within and the service is excellent. I always feel funny about being able bodied and the bagger loading my groceries in the car and often decline. The problem is that there is nothing else near so everyone goes there. If you stretch the driving time and dollars there are others but this is it so EVERYONE goes there. We live in a strange part of town that encompasses both the Lake Nona Country Club as well as a decidedly more down home Osceola county line with it’s country roads and citrus groves so the mix of people is astounding and they all converge on one store. The thing about it is that Publix feels behind the times, like they are too busy to update. They wrap produce in plastic and styrofoam which kills me and the environment. I can’t choose my own items and have twice as much trash. They are behind trend on prepared foods offering mostly Southern staples of macaroni and at many varieties of mayonaise based salad pre-packs. You can forget about whatever new item being flogged on tv or the internet – they will not have it. I drove 40 minutes with a cooler in the trunk to buy Johnsonville Chicken Sausage. One thing they do have? British food. I have no idea why but the selection of British chocolates is divine and there is no shortage of cans of beans for toast and bottles of HP brown sauce. Recently I saw that they had added steamed puddings in flavors of Golden Syrup, Spotted Dick and Sticky Toffee by Aunty’s to the lineup. I couldn’t pass that up and variously brought home all three. Thirty seconds in the microwave and you will be transported to the cool rainswept byways of the British isles. They are crazy sweet and Golden Syrup and Sticky Toffee are positively oozing with golden syrup. Z calls them puddingses and we have to split one lest we be overwhelmed by caramelly sweetness. The spotted dick is studded with currants and a bit more ginger which lends an exotic note to dessert.
two months
based on the date I took the photo I am exactly two months delayed in noting a Lake Nona milestone-a second grocery store. December 15th marked the day we walked in to the expansively aisled Publix. There is a somewhat wider selection that the Moss Park Publix. While we know it makes us uncool it is really great to shop here on Saturday nights when the aisles look something like . . .
get away – go away
sometime in the vicinity of the ‘fall’ it all went awry. We had two notable and painful deaths of co-workers. Many people had an acute sense of loss and pain for reasons ranging to years of teamwork to being walked to their cars on dark evenings and weekends after staying open late for visitors. Then, fresh griefs as our pastor at church abruptly left citing an affair that he had every plan to continue and under allegations of spousal and alcohol abuse. Other small things felt bigger – hopes of peace for the season washed away in fell swoops. With thoughts only of mental escape we booked a cruise for five days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Five days of feet up, magazine and book reading, fruity cocktails, exploring new places without a care in the world. Total bummer that two days before we were scheduled to depart I got a cold that kept on giving – so far going on two months and still with a tickle of a cough. I think it was one of those things that comes when you let your guard down and begin to relax… But we booked it and I figured I could Purell my way across the Gulf of Mexico. We packed up and headed out for the blue skies of winter -except they weren’t. 
It rained in Tampa. It rained in Grand Cayman. It rained so hard in Cozumel that I bought a poncho (cough cough tourist) and was almost declared dorky for wearing it. Rain, rain, go away! Bright points? Of course. We perused the shops on Grand Cayman until the rain drove us inside and bought some chocolate bars from a non-English speaker in Cozumel while dodging raindrops. I saw the most gloriously large pod of dolphins. I was out one morning drinking coffee on the deck and reading/thinking/staring into the distance with two ‘old’ guys when we all three saw splashes of dolphins jumping. I didn’t have a camera and am probably better off for it since the image is ingrained in my mind. I would guess 70 to 100 dolphins were swimming a half mile or so (hard to say I guess) behind the boat. Stunning! We enjoyed our time-eating chocolate melting cakes for dinner, trying sushi, playing the penny slots and watching shows and celebrating some Christmas downtime. We sat open seating for lots of meals chatted with people from all walks of life. Getting away from our cares and definitely from it all.
My Urban Pantry 