Cooking

Say it with me: bacon-wrapped scallops.

/ Claire / 9 Comments

Well. This week just flew by, didn’t it?

I’ve been busy putting wedding material together the past few days, which has been a fun and time-consuming process. Luckily, Jamey entertained you today with a fun history post. (Don’t we wish he shared more like this?)

However, my labor for love hasn’t been all we’ve been up to this week. Jamey started bootcamp (not the army-kind, but the extreme workout version), we cooked duck confit in the sous vide (which you know we will blog the next go-round when I’m camera ready), my car broke down, was towed then brought back to life, and I had a race cancelled last night due to bad weather and street floods (plus some pretty crazy hail, which I have never seen in this town).

But really, it wasn’t a bad week despite the last bits. We even built up a little backlog of recipes to share!

One of these recent experiments was bacon wrapped sous vide scallops, which we pulled together a couple weeks ago. Should I say that again slowly? Bacon. Wrapped. Scallops. Drool with me, if you will.

Scallops, bacon, arancini. Oh, my.

Continue reading →

Old Village Eatings

/ Claire / 2 Comments

Last night didn’t turn out exactly as planned. If you haven’t yet followed our Twitter feed (get on that!), but Jamey’s flight was cancelled yesterday morning, which invariably led to my cancelling of his dinner reservation. Luckily, my friend Anne was still onboard, and the evening turned into a wonderful girls’ night out at Old Village Post House in Mt. Pleasant.

Look at these jerks who get to have homes right on the water.

The Old Village is tucked away in the off-beaten paths of Charleston, where every home has a front porch as wide as the house and trees draped with Spanish moss. The homes in this neck of the woods epitomize Lowcountry living, settled into the marsh and most glorious at the time of the evening sunset. (I used to live in the Old Village, and wandering over there last night made me want to live there again.)

Dinner was a lovely progression of food and beer tastings, paired with brews from Lefthand Brewing. While the food was good, what really overpowered each course were the beers themselves.

I’ve never paired multiple courses with beer before, and I’m not sure this one exactly turned me into a beer pairing convert. I still am astounded by the incredible wine and food pairings we had at Tristan…those flavors truly were exceptional. Therefore, the bar was already set extremely high when I sat down for my meal last night. It’s hard to compete when the last paired wine five-course meal you had blew anything else out of the water.  Continue reading →

Postponed Recipes and Photo Spreads

/ Claire / 3 Comments

Today was supposed to be my big recipe post of this glorious stuff:

That would be smoked chicken penne pasta with pesto.

…Except I did the unthinkable and can’t remember the details for the pesto recipe. (I know, right?)

I even have step-by-step pictures, but my brain is fried from excess thinking and too many hours in Target last night. We’ll just have to put that off for now until Jamey can go over it with me again later. I think I remember all the ingredients, but I don’t think you’re in the mood for a listed-out recipe today anyway, are you? Thought so.

There are too many fun things and thirsty Thursdays to prepare for in this world, including our very special Firefly/Lefthand Brewery dinner tonight at Village Post House. (Clearly I am excited since I have now said multiple times the full names of all companies involved with this dinner. Nothing like encouraging SEO traffic with mentions of libations and delicious food!)

I’m in the mood to do a photo spread, since we’ve had many a memorable moment in photo form over the past few weeks and not nearly enough posts in which to share them. Also, since some of you are not on Facebook and/or are not FB friends with the both of us, pictures – good pictures – sometimes slide by the wayside. And we can’t possibly have that.

Depending on how this post goes over with you, we might just need to make this a little routine from time to time – especially on the mornings when Claire feels a greater need to turn around and crawl back in bed, and in this case, when she starts writing about herself from a third person perspective.

I’ll just hush up now and will give you the photos.

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From belt buckles to wedding dresses

/ Claire / 1 Comment

After yesterday’s somewhat somber note, I figured I should 180 the tone of this blog with a little sass from Jamey. We need to bring the silly back.

Therefore, today we bring you another round of The Internet and Alcohol Do Not Mix, part deux. Here’s a picture of the man model himself:

Bit the bullet and bought the belt buckle.

Yes, that is what you think it is: Jamey had a little too much Firefly and lemonade one night last week and bought himself a new belt buckle – made of bullets. Ridiculous. Continue reading →