In the Midst of a Move

What an awful, stressful week. Moving is such a bitch. I've been struggling to find a house to rent in our new hometown. And it is sad to move out of my beloved little apartment here.

But, amid the struggle to find a new place to live, we had some fun on our West Virginia trip, too. A moderate amount of fun.

We ventured to the Historic Wine Cellars Park in Dunbar, WV. This is just what the name suggests it might be. It's really creepy, damp, and cold inside the cellars. There's also a nice fishing pond through the woods.

On the way back to Richmond, we stopped at the New River Gorge Main Overlook. I'm glad we did. We saw a breathtaking view from the overlook and we got some brochures from the visitors center that have given me really good adventure ideas. We will be going back to this area fo sho.

Food things we did: ate tacos and drank plenty (BEST margaritas!) at a fun little restaurant in Charleston called The Tricky Fish; enjoyed an Indian food buffet lunch at Little India; ate at Cracker Barrel twice because it was next to our hotel; ate too much fried food at Diehl's Family Restaurant; had beer and tasty pizza at Pies and Pints.

We also explored many neighborhoods, got to know my new coworkers a little better, and killed time at the awesome Capitol Market by people watching and eating chocolate. One of my favorite parts was when we accidentally saw a greyhound race because we got lost while looking for a restaurant and ended up at a casino. The greyhounds are SO FAST, it's amazing! I've been doing a lot of research to find out more about greyhounds and racing and whether it's inhumane. Oh, AND we got covered in fleas in a nasty little rental house. Yeah! Adventures!

So I'm now relaxing with a glass of wine and a book. And hoping hard that I'll have a place to live by this time next week. Or preferably sooner!

Recipe: Campfire Quinoa Stew

Things have been crazy around here. That's why I haven't written. Boyfriend and I took a couple days off and had an extra long Memorial Day weekend camping in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. I also have a job interview in West Virginia in a couple weeks which has had my mind working overtime.

Anyway, while we were camping I made a tasty campfire stew that I want to remember the recipe for. I'm naming it Campire Quinoa Stew, and here are the ingredients:

- Half of a large sweet onion, diced
- Half of a bell pepper, diced
- A large carrot (or a bunch of baby carrots, diced
- a cube and a half of vegetable bouillon
- 2 tblsp olive or sunflower oil
- 1.5 c of water
- 3/4 c uncooked quinoa
- a big handful of uncooked lentils
- diced roasted red tomatoes (I bought the Kroger brand because it featured a pop-top can lid, requiring no can opener.)

Clearly these ingredients are pretty flexible, but I chose veggies I'd be using in other meals as well and other stuff that would be easy to handle while camping. It would be delicious with any bean but I didn't want to take a can opener so I used lentils instead since they can be cooked pretty quickly. The campfire smokiness is what made the stew special but I'm still going to cook something similar at home, I'm sure. My recipe yielded 3-4 servings and it's more filling that you'd expect.

In a campfire-safe soup pot, sautee the onion, carrot, and pepper in olive oil until they start to become tender. Throw in your veggie bouillon. Throw in your quinoa. Stir it all up and let sautee for a couple minutes.

Add water and canned tomatoes. Add lentils. Stir. Once the soup starts boiling, move it to a cooler part of the fire, cover, and allow to simmer. How long the soup needs to simmer depends on your fire. Mine simmered for 30-40 minutes and I just checked it every 10 mins until the lentils were tender.

I think this meal will go into our regular gourmet camping dinner rotation. It's healthy, filling, and highly nutritious. Like every other meal I make while camping, it took forever to cook! Get started early because it takes a good hot fire to get the veggies sauteed and the liquids boiling.

I will post more about the trip soon. It was fun but Boyfriend had a nasty cold so we sort of took it easy. Saw lots of beautiful things though and came home feeling refreshed.

Bread Machine Sweet Potato Rolls

More success with the bread machine! Yeah! I mixed this roll dough in the bread machine and then baked them in the oven. They were super easy (though they did take some time to rise). These sweet potato rolls have a great texture and orange-ish color, but they do not have a strong sweet potato flavor. Their flavor is very subtle.

Mmm, homemade sweet potato rolls!

Ingredients: 

1/2 c warm water

1 medium cooked and mashed sweet potato (I cut mine up and boiled it)

4 tbsp brown sugar

3 tbsp softened butter

2 eggs

1 + 1/8 c whole wheat flour

2 + 1/2 c all-purpose flour
2 tbsp vital wheat gluten (not necessary if you're using bread flour)

2 tsp salt

1.5 tsp bread machine yeast

You want this dough to be pretty dry. It should be easy to handle, because you're going to create little balls out of the dough and then put them in a greased baking pan to rise and bake. I used pie pans, and my dough balls looked like this:

After rising for about 45 minutes, they looked like this:

Stick em in the oven at 375 for 15 or 20 minutes, and you've got some awesome rolls for fall and winter! Great rolls for a soup or stew. I served mine with roasted chicken and vegetables.

For these rolls, I adapted a recipe from Allrecipes. It provides instructions for preparing the rolls without a bread machine, using slightly different ingredients.

Sunday, Day 2 in Switzerland

I was supposed to write this yesterday, but I went to Station 2 and had a couple beers and a veggie burger for dinner, and thus I lost all motivation to do anything. While I digested that enormous greasy meal, I did watch The King's Speech. It WAS a good movie! I wonder if the book it's based on is any good.

Anyway, the topic of this post is DAY 2 IN SWITZERLAND.

Based on something the owner of the resort told us, we decided to drive to a nearby city called Martigny to see the Combat des Reines. This is a festival involving cows that fight in an ancient Roman amphitheater to display their dominance. The winner gets a sort of parade and a very big bell to wear around her neck. It's not like Spanish bull fight or anything. It's what the cows would do naturally in their pastures. So this sounded like a fun time and we wanted to check it out.

Well we got to Martigny and found a public parking lot. There was a map in the lot, and so we stared at it for a while but didn't understand where anything was. After a few minutes, all these people had gathered in a big group in a parking lot. A little train that was not a train but more like tractor pulling some rolling cars for passengers, pulled into the parking lot, and the crowd of people loaded into the cars. I said, "let's get on the train!" Boyfriend was hesitant, but he followed me.

I figured the train was going to take us to the Combats des Reines, right? Well, we rolled through a beautiful medieval city center and up a mountain. It was a little scary because the turns were very tight and we were riding on little trailers behind a tractor. But it was fun. And when the train stopped, we were at a medieval fortress on top of a mountain. The train tractor driver told me that he'd be back to pick everyone up, so we got out to explore the castle.

When we got inside the castle, there was huge crowd of people and some of them were coming out from inside the castle with plates of food. We were hungry at this point, and I was down with eating some of the food, but we really did not understand what was happening in this place. There was a sign that said the plate of food was 25 francs (that's like $22). People were eating cheese, bread, pickles, grapes, roasted chestnuts, and they were drinking wine. Boyfriend wanted to leave, and I couldn't really argue for why to stay other than it seemed like fun to me, so we left and waited for the train to come back. This all sounds like a waste of time, and mostly is was, but riding on the little tractor train was kind of fun, we got to see the medieval city center, and the views from the top of the mountain were pretty impressive.

View from the top of the mountain in Martigny.

We rode the train back down the mountain and stared at the map again for a while and walked in the direction where the believed the Combats des Reines to be. We arrived at a big gate in front of a space with all these buildings and food stands, and it looked like a festival was happening inside. Again, we didn't understand what was going on. It cost some money to go in. I don't remember how much, 12 francs maybe. So we paid the money at the gate and we went in. Inside, we bought some roasted chestnuts (chestnuts are a big deal here apparently), and we ate them. They were good. Then we wandered around the buildings and tents and realized that this was not where we wanted to be. They were selling things, like flooring, kitchen appliances, telephone service, wine, and an endless number of products that we did not want. We left, grumpy that we had paid money to get in. We were also hungry and thirsty which made the grumpy factor even worse.

Well, we wandered around for quite a while before we found the amphitheater and the Combat des Reines. I asked several people where to go but their directions were not very good (I won't blame my weak French language skills). When we got to the amphitheater, it was crowded. We tried to go in and we were told we had to buy a ticket. It was 20 francs per person to watch the cows fight. Hungry and tired, we decided not to pay that much to see the Combats des Reines. This is a decision I regret now, because I really wanted to see what was going on in there... but we felt too exhausted to handle any more confusion. By this time, it was 4 pm, all the cafes had closed, and we decided to head toward home.

Before we left though, I did get to see some of the cows waiting to go into the amphitheater. They are some pretty impressive beasts. Remember, these are female!

Cows waiting for the Combat des Reines

She looks like a winner to me.

We made up for a stressful day in Martigny when we got back to Champoussin. We drank a lot and ate a lot of fondue and then fell asleep at 8:30. Fondue is like heaven in your mouth.

Next time: Chillon Castle.

Boyfriend's Birthday Tinged with Ringworm Blues

Well, last week was a difficult one for work reasons, and this one has been rough for personal reasons. It's a good time to remind myself that the Swiss adventure is a mere 3 weeks away.

Boyfriend's birthday weekend was nice. His parents took us to dinner at Farmer Johnson's Country Kitchen on Saturday.  We had never been there, but we found a flyer/menu at Farm to Family Market, and we were interested in giving it a try. It was a bit disappointing to walk in and discover that Farmer Johnson's is a self-service restaurant, where you order at the counter and pour your own drinks at a fountain. We were quite looking forward to having a nice sit-down type meal. The food was good though. Fries are shoe-string. My chicken sandwich was unsurprising but good.

After dinner, I took Boyfriend out for cocktails and dessert at The Roosevelt, a new neighborhood place that is every bit as lovely as we expected it to be. I should have taken pictures! I forgot. Oh well. We had fancy $9 cocktails (what a splurge), and I ordered the Buttermilk Panna Cotta and Boyfriend had Peanut Butter Pie. Mine was super delicious, but I totally was jealous of the Peanut Butter Pie. My Panna Cotta was served in a small Mason Jar, topped with fresh blueberries, served with a small spoon for easy scooping. Such a creamy treat. But that pie was phenomenal. We can't wait to try the Roosevelt for dinner. We went at 8:30 on a Saturday and had to wait to even get a spot at the bar, so I imagine we'll be going on a weekday once we recover financially from the upcoming vacation. 

We had a bonfire on Sunday night, which was fun but my description of it would be uninteresting to most people. S'mores replaced birthday cake. People shared good beer with us. I made a nice grilled cabbage. What I did was this. Use these ingredients:

A little more than half a cabbage, chopped to desired size for eating
Several pats of butter
A couple squirts of soy sauce

Put the ingredients in an aluminum foil packet (I actually made two packets), and put them on a hot grill for about 25 minutes. I cooked mine on a metal structure above an open fire. Good cabbage!

Boyfriend's birthday week was tainted, unfortunately, by the illness of dear kitten Butter Bean. The vet diagnosed her with ringworm. She had several bald rashes that spread and multiplied, so I took her to the vet, and we found out after cuddling and kissing her for two weeks that she was covered in fungus. I am now also infected, and I've got a few tiny ringworm rashes the size of a dime. I've been able to treat the infections right away so it hasn't been a big deal, but it has required a lot of energy. The vet told me to quarantine the kitten. Where am I supposed to put her? I have a one bedroom apartment! Well, I kept her in the bathroom for two days and she meowed constantly and got all worked up over the ringworm treatment so she got the shits, of course. Then she peed on the floor and there was blood in her urine, which scared me tremendously, so we were back at the vet right away. Ugh. Butter Bean has had a seriously rough week. If it's been stressing me out, imagine how she must feel.

So she has a bladder infection and she's on an antibiotic now. Several of the ringworm rashes are improving. I failed at keeping her in quarantine because it simply wasn't worth it. I'm worried that having to give her medicine, dip her in a stinky sulfur bath, and pour stinging anti-fungal meds on her skin is harming our bond. I want to be able to cuddle her and let her crawl all over the place. I can't wait for her to be better.

We are going to finish the cat tree tomorrow. I will post about it soon, really! We have borrowed a big suitcase from Boyfriend's parents. Looking at it standing in the living room makes me feel so excited for our trip.

Strawberry Cobbler

My mom has a mean recipe for fruit cobbler, which was passed down to her from her mother. Like me, my mother has never been much of a baker. We didn't have cakes or cookies often when I was growing up, unless they were purchased from Food Lion. She did make cobblers though, and we had blueberry cobbler, blackberry cobbler, peach cobbler, and apple cobbler. All were delicious. But for some reason, we never had strawberry cobbler.

I got experimental last night and baked up a strawberry cobbler using my mom's easy and delicious cobbler recipe. It was a success! I love strawberry cobbler! Here's what it looked like (sorry I forgot to take the picture BEFORE we ate some of it).

 

I didn't have self-rising flour, so I added salt and baking powder to all purpose flour and it ended up making the cobbler very salty. I guess the butter was also salted. It still was a success though. I topped the cobbler with vanilla ice cream (a necessity). Here's the easy, old fashioned recipe:

1 cup self-rising flour

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup), melted

1 cup of sugar (separated)

3/4 cup milk

1 tbsp cornstarch

1 pint(ish) fresh or frozen strawberries

Preheat the oven to 350.

In a saucepan over a stove, heat the strawberries and 1/4 cup sugar over medium heat. Stir regularly. When the strawberries are bubbly and syrupy, add cornstarch and turn heat to low, continuing to stir regularly. 

In a casserole or baking dish, mix up the flour, melted butter, milk, and 3/4 cup sugar. Stir out the lumps. Spread the mixture over the bottom of the pan. Then pour the delicious strawberry stuff on top of the dough mixture and stick it in the oven. I'm not sure how long my cobbler cooked (about an hour I think), but keep an eye on it until it's done. 

Top the servings of warm cobbler with a scoop or two of vanilla ice cream. Mmm, mmm!