More leftovers from our winter vacation…
When you’re in the land of Mickey, how can you pass these up?
And finally after years of walking by the never ending line of tried kiddos, we ate at the Lady and the Tramp Italian Restaurant in Magic Kingdom.
Yes, the food was too pricey for the quality of the meal, but how can you pass an opportunity like this up?
National Pie day rolled around this year and I decided to have pie all day once again. I stretched lunch a little, but I think it still counts!
Breakfast: Apple tart with cheddar cheese.
I spread a little pie love with a free pie stand at work.
Lunch: Leftover cold pizza pie
Dinner: Spaghetti Pie
Dessert: Chocolate Pecan Pie with vanilla ice cream for dessert.
Happy Pie to All!
This winter day just called for being curled up on the couch all day. What do you eat when you chose to do nothing but snuggle in?
A toad in the hole for breakfast of course.
A bowl of cozy Italian bean vegetable soup for lunch.
And finally another round dish of baked spaghetti with kale and fresh tomatoes.
Now if I could only fit inside a bowl, the day would come full circle!
So all the “end of the world talk” made Lynley, John and I decide to have a “last meal” dinner on 12/22/12.
This also meant we had to put on our comfy, expanding eating pants, because if you’re eating your last meal then you don’t want uncomfortable clothes getting in the way.
Lyn decided her last supper would consist of lots and lots of shell fish. She’s allergic, so she could yell “to heck with it” and let her skin peel away while the earth ends around her. Needless to say we all believed there would be a tomorrow, so Lyn decided on an alternative last meal with less ramifications.
Chips, dip and Red Stripe beer.
You may not know this but Lynley had goldfish named chip and dip as a child so her passion for her final food was sincere. We did pick-up some “quality” chips just to fancy it up a bit.
John debated on his meal. He loves breadsticks with cheese dip and Lyn’s chips and dip almost pushed him in that direction. Instead he went with cheese manicotti with Cupini’s pasta sauce. I decided to make him breadsticks anyway…when the world may or may not be ending, why not have it all?
I, of course, had Paul Newman’s vodka sauce. Although it was tempting to eat it straight from the jar, which I might have done if the people speculating about the Mayan’s seemed to be right, I cooked it up with the widest pasta noodle I could find. I had to have a big glass of Pinot, fresh mozzarella, and garlic stuffed olives too.
…and a breadstick to wipe up that extra sauce! I made that sort of, but not really, last meal count.
Not only did we dine on some of our favorite foods, we decided to make a dinner and a movie of it.
Here we’re our doomsday choices….
We went with the less apocalyptic choice of Talladega Nights. I’m not sure what this says about us but it says something.
Well the world didn’t end, but our comfy, eating pants were put to good use.
We went to see Paul McCartney in St. Louis recently. The show wasn’t until later and I was all primed for an Italian feast on the famous Hill, the birthplace of fried ravioli. I got restaurant recommendations from lots of people and was prepared to have my pasta-loving socks blown off.
And then we discovered that almost every restaurant on the Hill is closed on Sundays! Ack!
While trying to find somewhere else very St. Louis to eat, John remembered eating at the Spaghetti Factory on family trips as a kid.
We both knew that the food was not going to be the same as the Hill, but we decided to indulge a craving for nostalgia instead.
John had the basic tomato sauce and pasta (which he probably ordered as a kid).
And I ordered their special Mizithra cheese pasta. The placemat told me to do it.
We laughed a lot during that dinner and enjoyed stepping back into John’s childhood. Was the perfect pre-Paul meal? As long as I was with my honey, you bet it was!
And, yes, we were wearing matching Wings t-shirts.
John and I are regulars at two restaurants: Dos Reales on 75th Street and Johnny Cascones on 91 St.
Dos Reales was a happy accident as most “regulars” experience. You just eat there a lot and the staff starts to recognize you.
Cascones is a different situation completely. Yes, I’m just going say it, we’ve worked at being regulars. Nine years ago we were dining there and loved the food and the atmosphere so much we decided to “become” regulars.
How you might ask? We ate there 3 times a month. We always put in a reservation by name. We remembered staff names and tipped like friends not customers. We even had our wedding reception there. Extreme I know…
Here’s the thing though, it was all done with genuine love for the restaurant, the food, and the people and over the years the staff and owners have noticed.
Nine years later, I bring the staff baked goods at Christmas, we get friendly “drop-byes” at our table from long time staff, they note when we haven’t been in for a while, and my most favorite thing – a handshake and warm chit-chat when we arrive and leave. I look forward to the day we’re the little old couple who get a hug when they walk in the door– that is my lifetime goal.
We’ve seen it happen.
But now I’m happy with the fact that they not only recognize us, they really like us. And I can’t help but feel
Iike (in a small way) part of the Cascones family — which is what being a regular is really about right?
Our Cascones dinner from Saturday night:
Emily with her shells, mushrooms, broccoli and cheese sauce .
Regular, John Young with his standard cheese ravioli.
And me with marinara, spaghetti and mushrooms.
Thanks for loving us back Cascones.
can’t go wrong with a bowl of pasta
despite the fact that it’s now october and we have had freezing temperatures, dad’s garden just keeps chugging out tomatoes. for meatless monday i decided to create a creamy tomato sauce to use up the giant bowl of tomatoes i have. first i sautéed tomatoes, garlic, onions, and red peppers in olive oil. while that was sauteing i sent the noodles to boiling. for a change and to use up the box of random lasagna noodles i broke up the lasagna noodles real small to create a more eatable noodle. once all was sautéed and boiled i tossed them together. to get a quick and tad bit healthier cream sauce the secret is goat cheese. crumble goat cheese into the hot pasta and viola cream sauce. not bad for using up a lot of leftovers.
nothing is better than a big bowl of pasta
as you all probably know steph and i are just a tad obsessed with paul newman’s vodka sauce. it is not only the best vodka sauce that can be bought in a jar it is EXTREMELY hard to find. we have been known to buy multiple jars when we stumble across it. my favorite is when one sister finds it and calls the other sister going “i’m at this store, they’ve got it. how many jars you want?” so if there is a jar in the cabinet, of this sacred sauce, it has to feel just right to open it up and use it.
meatless monday last week just seemed to be calling out for mr. newman’s vodka sauce. dad’s garden has started chugging out vegetables like crazy and those tomatoes, zucchinni, onions all just seeded calling for a pasta dish. as i sat down and tasted my creation i knew i had been right……….. mmmmmmmmm
Looks nice doesn’t it?
Hmm. Don’t trust it.
But why? It looks like a lovely lemon pesto with whole wheat linguine and a salad.
All I have to say is thank the Cooking Gods for the salad.
What went wrong?
Lynley was visiting for the weekend, so of course we needed to cook together. We made a pesto recipe (Linda McCartney’s, whom I love but I have found out has some, Paul forgive me, questionable recipes).
Granted, I don’t make pesto very often, maybe once or twice a year, so neither of us realized what was going wrong.
What might that be, you ask? Oh. Let’s just say the recipe called for 8-10 cloves of garlic.
Yeah, that first bite was a doozy.
NOW I know that normal pesto only has about 2-4 cloves of garlic AND that is plenty.
The taste was just heat and no flavor at all. I laughed at the delicate, gentle squeeze of lemon I had added to the sauce thinking about the citrus flavors. HA!
We both tired to fix the situation. I added tomato sauce, olive oil and more cheese.
Lynley went for more cheese and a heck of a lot more olive oil.
Nothing worked. It tasted awful. And the worst part was that the taste wouldn’t go away.
Frozen custard Sundaes with homemade whipped cream for dessert couldn’t even put out the garlic fire in our bellies.
The next step for me- Tums.
The next step for Lyn- a shot of whiskey.
Needless to say when we got up in the morning, Linda’s pesto was still with us.
Even good cooks have bad days. Did we laugh? Oh, yes we did.
I’m just glad we cooked our worst meal ever together.
(Lynley grinning and whipping up a hopeful antidote).
The best meal if the year (so far) took place on Wednesday, April 11th at 8:30 PM in Chicago Illinois at a restaurant we’ve walked by tons of times going to our favorite Chicago Italian restaurant, Volarie. On this particular night Volarie chose to close early and fate dropped us off at Coco Pazzo Cafe’s doorstep. Thank you fate.
We started with a chopped seven vegetable salad topped with a thin slice of Parmesan. Amazing! Hardly any greens, but plenty of tasty veg. There was so much flavor and so little dressing of any kind.
John had a spicy spaghetti. We didn’t know the dish was spicy until they sat it in front of John with a chili pepper in the center. It had heat, but wasn’t over the top spicy, which was good for me since I don’t like spicy and I kept eating it off his plate!
I had this incredible butternut squash stuffed pasta in a rosemary, sage, butter, amaretto sauce. The best thing about this dish was the crispy bread crumbs sprinkled on top of the pasta. They soaked up the sauce and added another level of flavor to the meal. I wanted to coat myself in bread crumbs and roll around in the sauce.
For dessert we ordered gelato and spumoni. John had lemon while I had two kinds of gelato, chocolate and cinnamon.
And yes, we did close the restaurant (a first for us), but we left a big tip! Thank you Coco!
Hearty Eaters 