New Year's Eve Bouillabaisse

What do boring people do New Year's Eve?

They cook! Here's a shot of our New Year's Eve bouillabaisse. I believe that it is traditional in some cultures to serve fish on New Year's Eve. This stew featured mussels, tilapia, clams, scallops, and shrimp, but the key ingredient was the 3/4 teaspoon of smoked paprika. Yum.

We served it with griddled sourdough bread and some fancy Spanish olive oil. We also had some aioli to drop right into your soup, nice and garlicky. The whole thing was very Spanish.

Any food or cooking New Year's resolutions out there?

Happy New Year everybody!

East African pomegranate citrus juice

How's that sound? Good, yes, and we had two pomegranates from the gigantic fruit basket that Ray and Edith gave us, and some spare oranges and tangerines, and we were thirsty, so for breakfast on the day after Christmas, I made some juice. Kevin helped. We used a recipe from A Vegan Taste of East Africa by Linda Majzlik.

Step one, cut two pomegranates and spoon out the seeds.


Two, boil with two cups water and a tablespoon of brown sugar, five minutes.


Three, put cooked seeds in fridge while squeezing a couple cups of fresh juice, using high-leverage press made in Aguascalientes, Mexico.


Four, when the seeds are cool, squeeze out as much juice as possible.

Five, mix and serve. Very refreshing!

Just a Tuesday evening with Tricia

Hello Barrys (and fans of the blog),

Whenever I am home for breaks I enjoy catching up with my good friend Tricia. This break, all she has been talking about is The Barry Table (she is it's number one fan) and how she longs for the good food while at school.
We were chatting away about life and food when we realized that it was approaching 9pm and neither of us had eaten dinner! I know that my mother would be horrified if I skipped a precious meal, so quickly we began going through her fridge.
"How about sandwiches?" I asked (of course).
"Great!"
So we pulled out the lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, onions, several fancy mustards, two kinds of hummus, mushrooms, carrots (?), and a variety of nice cheese. I have to admit, I was getting pretty excited seeing all of these great ingredients come out.
"Uh, we might be low on bread..." Tricia said sadly holding up one end piece in a bread bag. "But I have been wanting make some!"
"Okay!"
So we put the sandwiches on hold and pulled out the computer, to look up a bread recipes, and Tricia's bread maker to (duh) make bread. While piling in the ingredients we realized that making bread in a bread maker takes 3+ hours, so we wouldn't have our dear sandwiches until about 12:45am.
This was no good.
Back to the fridge, and ah, glory, english muffins!
We ended up eating fried egg (with mushrooms) sandwiches on toasted english muffins. The sandwiches had orange pepper, tomato, red onion, lettuce, and garlic chili pepper cheddar cheese (slightly melted, to add a gooey warm goodness that complimented the fried egg nicely).
Mustard was tough decision because Tricia had a wide spectrum of mustard types, from sweet to spicy. Organic whole grain from france went on Tricia's sandwich and organic dijon from Whole Foods for me (both of which Tricia kindly pointed out earned the USDA organic seal of approval).
While I was perfecting the art of the fried egg Tricia took the anitiative to make ours a well rounded meal and busted out her organic roasted red pepper and tomato soup. She chose to heat it up in the microwave, adding salt, pepper, and parsely at precisily the right moment in the heating process. Her specialty.

We chowed down on our fantastic meal while listening to the bread machine continue to knead our precious whole wheat bread, now not needed for sandwiches.

After a few more hours of chatting we enjoyed a nice snack of warm whole wheat bread with seedless red raspberry butter (not organic!) and tazo red apple tea at 12:45am.

Winter Homecoming and Birthday

Not only was it the last day of fall, December 20, 2008, it was also Pat's 52nd birthday, Erin's 19th (a couple of days late), and Mom's/Granny's homecoming celebration -- she just got back home on Tuesday after a couple of months in hospitals and nursing homes.

We had almost everyone there -- Mom/Granny, John, Anne, Dave, Pat, Pam, Kevin, Carolyn, Brian, Sheila, Erin, Adam, Grace, Mike, and Lori. (Plus Rose, Mom's caregiver, who got a break in her room during our festivities.) We were missing Sean and Nanette, who are in California, and Janet and Freddy, who are in Florida.

You can see all the photos here, or in the slide show below.

It's good to be home

Hi Barrys,

Freddy and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the "dancing fools" slide show. It looks like everyone had a great time at the wedding, and Freddy and I thought that the night could not have gone more perfectly.

We had a relaxing yet activity-filled honeymoon. Our first port of call was San Juan, Puerto Rico. We wandered around the city in search for the perfect authentic Puerto Rican food, and found it at a small family run restaurant, with a modest size home-like kitchen. We both ordered mofongo, which is mashed green plantains with garlic and olive oil, very similar to mashed potatoes. It is then "stuffed" with chicken or shrimp. Unfortunately we didn't taken any pictures, but a couple days after arriving home, Freddy successfully made his own mofongo.
Also pictured are some of the new pots and pans we've received for wedding gifts and have been using daily.

Another port of call was St. Maarten/St. Martin. The spelling of the island's name depends on if you are on the Dutch side or the French side of the island, and they speak at least 5-6 languages: French, Dutch, Creole, Papiamentu, Spanish, and English. There is a famous beach here that is literally across the street from a landing strip of an airport. Freddy is somewhat fascinated by airplanes and has watched youtube videos of plane landing over this beach. So we ventured out and found a taxi to take us across the mountainous island to Maho beach.
It was AWESOME and Freddy was in heaven.

This sign reads: "jet blast of arriving and departing aircraft can cause severe physical harm resulting in extreme bodily harm and/or death"

Don't worry Mom, we're OK.

Another highlight of the cruise was the cruise ship itself, which had countless activities and wonderful food. They was plenty of variety for dinner each night, and we both ate quite a bit of Indian food. We also became friendly with our Indian waiter, who claims that the Indian food on the ship is just OK, and if we'd like to try real Indian food someday he can give us his mom's address in Mumbai.

Here is a picture of us on the Royal Promenade, which is like the town square or main street of the ship.


And now its back to normal life....thanks to everyone that celebrated with us!

Love,
Janet

Good food . . . and survival food

On Thanksgiving, two days before the wedding, we took the whole day to cook good food and be together as Janet worked through the table cards and we talked about the final details on what would become a legendary party. And we ate well, as the photo above suggests.

But you can't always manage "great" food. Sometimes when a mother is in the hospital, you fall back to survival food. The other day when I called Brian about Mom's trip to Swedish Covenant, he said, "I guess I'll lift weights for a while, take a shower, eat some leftover pasta with a fried egg on top, then go to the hospital." I was impressed: a pretty healthy approach to difficult times.

Tonight I didn't do so well. After a short nap this afternoon it was too late to cook any decent food before heading to the hospital, and we didn't have much in the fridge, anyway. What I managed? Rice with pepper-jack cheese on top and some leftover spinach, microwaved. To drink, in honor of Mom, a can of V8 juice. Not my best meal ever.

Apples + Butter + Sugar = APPLE STUDEL

As a child I remember my grandma making apple strudel before every holiday. She would make philo dough by hand, rolling it out on top of a linen tablecloth on our kitchen table. She would roll the dough out until it was the size of the table, then begin to fold it over, add a layer of butter, fold again, another layer of melted butter, until the dough was the size of a cake pan. My brother Patrick says it's called a laminated dough. Since we are beginners we bought frozen philo dough in a box. Perhaps some year we will graduate to making the dough ourselves, but this year I hoped to renew the tradition with my brother Patrick, a great chef and the family "food pornographer" along with our somewhat reluctant children. We spent a good hour peeling apples, then on to mixing in cinnamon, sugar and breadcrumbs. The really, really, hard part was layering philo dough, then brushing on a layer of butter, then adding a layer of philo dough, then brushing on a layer of melted butter, philo, butter, philo, butter, philo butter, the dough was tearing, too much butter was being used. We sent Brian off to the hardware store to get better quality paint brushes to layer on the butter. It really didn't seem to help much. I think now, the key is to keep the butter pretty warm, almost hot - that way it spreads quicker. In all it took us 3 hours to make 6 strudels, and some of you may have enjoyed one on Thanksgiving. I have some in the freezer, so on Christmas we can chow down!

Dancing Fools

What a wild wonderful wedding weekend. Too many highlights to share, so I'll limit myself to one -- the spirited dancers from the Barry and Byrne clans. 

Or click here:
http://flickr.com/photos/johnbyrnebarry/sets/72157610604340579/show/

And here are the rest of the weekend photos:

http://flickr.com/photos/johnbyrnebarry/sets/72157610577933111/