Culinary Adventures with Camilla

  This month, for Food'N'Flix , Amy of Amy's Cooking Adventures is hosting Food'N'Flix a month after our online book group Lit Happens read the book on which the movie is based:  P.S. I Love You* . You can read her invitation here .  I enjoyed P. S. I Love You , the book, but I'm going to say something that I rarely say: I vastly preferred the movie.  There are marked differences between the book and the movie that almost make it a completely different story! For starters, movie Holly was much more likeable than book Holly. A Rom-Com with a Twist P.S. I Love You is a rom-com with a twist, namely that the love story involves a woman, Holly, and her now deceased husband, Gerry. The movie opens with a marital spat between Holly, played by Hilary Swank, and Gerry, played by Gerard Butler, as they bicker about something he said to her mother at dinner. Gerry : I'm sorry I said the wrong thing to your mother. God, I still get nervous around her. I still think, a...

I know that tomatoes had their chance and we're moving into hard squash season. But I still have tomatoes coming in from Jake and D's garden and a friend dropped off a box full recently. So I took the opportunity to make a tomato tart for dinner and want to share it with you in case you still have tomatoes available. This is based on a traditional French tart whose crust is smeared with mustard and topped with sardines. But I was the only one in the mood for sardines, so I'm not including it today. You can still see my slice - with the sardine! - at the end. Oh, a traditional tart would have a butter crust; I decided to make one with olive oil. Ingredients makes one 9-inch tart Olive Oil Crust 50 grams organic granulated sugar 1 large egg + 1 egg yolks 800 grams oil (I used olive oil) zest of 1 organic lemon, approximately 1 teaspoon 280 grams flour (I used all-purpose flour) pinch of salt 1 teaspoon baking powder Also needed: 9" tart pan with removable bottom, parc...

Next month several bloggers are tackling the challenge of creating nutritious meals that stay within the budgetary constraints of what a family of four receives on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) which is $5.53 or $16.60 for the day. Yes, really. Challenge accepted. For my first attempt at the challenge, I made Frugal Tuna Pasta with Roasted Brussels Sprouts that rang in at total of $5.13. With some of those leftover ingredients - the pasta and the sauce - I created a second recipe with canned sardines as my protein and a tossed green salad as the side dish. can of sardines, cost $1.29 pasta, package serves 8, so I used half (will use for another meal), cost $0.89 = $0.45 marinara sauce, used half (will use for another meal), cost $1.99 = $1.00 parmesan cheese, used one-third, cost $2.35 = $0.78 olive oil for pasta, cost negligible = $0.25 salt and pepper, cost negligible = $0.05 mixed salad greens, used one-third, cost $2.99 = $1.00 olive oil f...

This post is a little tardy as the oysters were part of our Real Good Fish CSF delivery last week. Inspired by the Miyagi oysters from Tomales Bay in Marin County, I wanted to create a simple stew . But, first, you have to shuck them. Click to read my post HOW TO: Shuck Oysters . Though this recipe feels luxurious, it's one you can easily pull off on a week night if you have the right ingredients. I added some fresh shrimp and sardines to the oysters to make a bigger pot though I didn't get to indulge because it has dairy and I'm still partially on my Whole30 Adventure . More on that soon because my month is almost up! Ingredients  serves 4 freshly shucked oysters in their liquid, about 4 to 5 per person 2 T butter 1 T olive oil 2 medium shallots, minced 2 garlic cloves, peeled and minced 1/2 lb peeled shrimp 1 tin sardines freshly ground salt freshly ground pepper 4 C milk 1 C heavy cream hot sauce to taste, optional crackers fo...

You can read about how I came to get such a lovely gift in my recipe post for Berenjenas con Miel (Eggplants with Black Honey): here . Also in that care package was a container of a Picual-Arbequina olive oil blend. I wanted to create a version of a Spanish dish featuring that flavorful oil and decided on  Patatas Aliñadas .  Patatas aliñadas is one of those dishes that doesn’t look very impressive; it has simple ingredients as it's basically potato salad. But the secret to this recipe is to use high quality ingredients that have a lot of fresh, vivid flavor. This olive oil has a strong, grassy taste with a little bit of a spicy kick at the end. It's delicious! In Cadiz, where some of the world’s best tuna is produced, they use tuna in this recipe. I decided to use some sustainably caught wild sardines for which our area is famous. Ingredients 1 to 2 pounds organic potatoes, scrubbed water 2 organic green onions, thinly sliced 2 T fresh par...

This is my final post as I prepare for the #ScorchedTerroir event for September's #winePW. Here's  my invitation . I couldn't decide on a single wine, so I'll be sharing wines from around the blog. My final wine of the virtual globe-trotting is from Sicily. Scorched Sicily... Unlike Santorini and New Zealand, I have actually been to Sicily. More than once. I love it and its surrounding islands! When I lived in Rome for a year, after college, I took a week long trip through Sicily and ended up on Lìpari, the largest in a chain of islands in a volcanic archipelago situated in between Vesuvius and Etna. I rented a cottage on a family's farm in Lìpari and was able to see them putting up a tomato harvest for the year. Truly amazing. Then, a few years later, I returned to Sicily with my husband and some friends and family. We stayed in Palermo then were stranded on Ustica, an island off the northwest coast, for a week. I write 'stranded' because we had onl...

"My dream was to help my hometown, a small island hidden under the A in Atlantic, called Swallow Falls. We were one of the leading exporters of sardines, until the day Baby Brent Sardine cannery closed when everyone realized that sardines...are super gross. So everyone was stuck eating all the sardines that nobody wanted. Frozen, boiled, dried, fried, candied and juiced. Life was gray and flavorless, but when things seem hopeless, I stared down at defeat, and found hope."   ~Flint Lockwood It's time for my Food'n'Flix submission for the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs double-feature. Click to read my invitation: here . Thankfully my family doesn't think that sardines are super gross! We love them...R even did a report on how important the sardine industry was to developing this area. So, though inspired by our love of meatballs - check out D's Lion Head Soup , R's Spaghetti and Meatballs , Bitokes from Russia, and Tajine-el-Khoukh   from ...

After our morning family field trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, we were all striken with our usual desire to eat seafood. I know that's counterintuitive. For a facility dedicated to the education and preservation of ocean creatures, we always walk out of there craving seafood. Oh, well. At least Riley was armed with his Seafood Watch card and rattled off the "best choices" while we were at the fish counter at the end of Wharf No. 2. Click here to see the Seafood Pocket Guide for the West Coast . So, we walked out of the market with eight freshly caught Pacific sardines, scallops, and halibut. We decided to have the sardines for dinner tonight. While trying to decide what to do with them, I came across a recipe for Sarde Ripiene . Stuffed Sardines. But first I had to clean them. What a chore! Hold the fish under cold running water and rub off the scales with your thumbnail. By hand, snap off the head and pull down; most of the innards will come out with the head. U...

Riley and I were just working on his history report about Monterey County; he opted to write about the sardine industry, when Cannery Row was literally a row of canneries, and about the purse-seiner the Geraldine-Ann. When he came across the term 'the silver tide', he didn't understand what it meant. So, I decided to open up a can of sardines for dinner. He looked at the glistening skin and said, "Oh, Mommy, I get it. There were so many sardines in the water that they looked like a silver wave." Exactly right. Sardines, according to the Seafood Watch put out by the Monterey Bay Aquarium , are now "abundant and healthy" and are labeled: Best Choice. Great. The boys love them. I served these over cooked barley with a turnip sunomo over fresh spinach. And we talked about how the sardines were overfished before and how they are being managed better these days.