Father's Day Dinner

This Father's Day marked a first in this house when it comes to cooking dinner. For the first time in the 9 plus years that my wife and I have been together, tonight was the first time she has ever cooked dinner for me. She isn't the most skilled in the kitchen, so it is just better if I handle the cooking duties. That being said, she pulled a rabbit out of the hat tonight and whipped up a very nice meal for her first time out of the box. I let her plan it all, prepare everything, cook it all, and then serve me. I figured of she was doing the first three that she might as well do the latter as well. :)

Here is a run down of what she made tonight:

Publix's recipe for "Party Chicken and Broccoli Salad". We had this a few months ago at my Aunt's house and she told my wife how easy it was to make. My wife insisted she could make it, if it was that easy, so today was her day to put that to the test. She passed.

Garlic Mashed Potatoes with Cheese
You can see the recipe for this dish below in the pictures. I was grab a picture of the laptop screen when she wasn't looking.

I was not allowed in the kitchen, thought I did sneak in to grab a few pictures, so I can't tell you for sure how she made everything. I can tell you thought that everything was cooked, or in the case of the broccoli salad and pie, and mixed very nicely. She earned herself another shot at cooking some point down the line.

Strawberry Creme Pie
I sort of assisted with this dessert as the three ingredients are Cool Whip, Strawberry Yogurt, and a ready to go pie crust.

My wife was going to buy Yoplait's Strawberry Yogurt. I convinced her that the Strawberry Greek Yogurt was the way to go, and it made all the difference in the world. Greek Yogurt is creamier and has a much sharper taste. It lent itself perfectly to this dessert when mixed with the Cool Whip.

Portobello at Downtown Disney

Some would say that it is sad that the best part of your meal was the bread. However, in this case it isn't really a bad thing. The problem is that there was nowhere for the meal to go but down after the bread and roasted garlic came out. I will get back to this in a second...

Portobello is one of those places you wouldn't expect to find in a place like Downtown Disney. It has the feel of a local family restaurant rather than one that is part of a bigger national restaurant group. Portobello is part of Levy Restaurants that also has Fulton's Crab House and Wolfgang Puck Grand Cafe in Downtown Disney. It has the charm of a local eatery and reminds you of that every step of the way through your meal.

Speaking of the meal, lets talk about the best part of it. After we ordered we were brought out a plate of roasted garlic. There was a bottle of olive oil on the table, so I poured some of that on the plate along with some cracked black pepper. The garlic is so tender you can dig your knife into it and spread the garlic on your bread like butter. This was like putting heaven on your bread with every bite. Really hard to have anything better once you taste this.

The salad came out and it was meh at best. For my lunch I got the meatball sliders. These were really good, and I was informed that they make all their meatballs fresh every morning. The first meatball, from left to right, was a chicken meatball. This was different and good all at the same time. The second meatball was a spicy pork one that had fire breathing out of it for days. The last meatball was a beef & veal meatball that was the best of the bunch.

For something off the beaten path while at Downtown Disney, Portobello was a pretty decent choice.

Valentine's Day Dinner 2011: Salmon Hearts

I racked my brain to figure out how I could top last years widely popular Valentine's Day Dinner. It took all of about 5 min to determine it would be "Salmon Hearts". No this isn't the actual heart from a Salmon. Instead I decided to cook some Salmon in the shape of hearts. This was a lot easier said than done.

To start off I needed to find fillets of Salmon that were big enough for me to cut hearts out and I decided the best way to accomplish this was via heart shaped cookie cutters. Fresh Market had some beautiful cuts and I decided to get two, one to cook regular and the other one to cut hearts out of. The salmon is "Cuban Style" as it was marinated with Nellie & Joe's Key West Style Cuban Marinade. This stuff is really the best marinade on the market and goes well with pretty much everything. Oh...back to the hearts.

I ventured over to Kitchen Outfitters and luckily they had one box of heart shaped cookie cutters left. This box was perfect because it had various sizes of hearts for me to use. The big debate I had with myself was to cut before cooking or after cooking. I decided to go with before cooking and these cutters went right through the Salmon like a hot knife through butter. That was a good thing, until I got to the skin. With all my good knives, not one of them would cut through that skin. So I ended up pulling the hearts off the skin. My big concern now was would these hearts hold their shape through the cooking process. Luckily for the most part they did hold their shape and worked out very nicely for the presentation. I cut the other fillet in half for us to share after it was done cooking.

As for the rest of the meal:

We started off with a Shrimp Cocktail and had Rosemary & Sea Salt Rolls with a balsamic-olive oil dipping mixture that included several spices. These spices were cracked black pepper, garlic, oregano, and cracked red pepper. The shrimp were fresh Wild Georgia Shrimp that I seasoned with some cajun rub. I also put some of this rub in the water that I boiled the shrimp in. After an ice bath they were peeled and placed on the place with a cocktail sauce heart.

The side items for dinner were garlic red skin mashed potatoes and fresh cut green beans & caramelized onions. I partly peeled the potatoes as I wanted to have some of the red skin in the mixture. I then mashed the cooked potatoes with butter, heavy whipping cream, garlic, and cracked black pepper. The mixture was then transferred to a baking dish and was finished in the oven. The green beans & onions were cooked in a little olive oil, salt, garlic, and pepper. I caramelized the onions and the green beans were still crisp with a great bite to them.

To compliment this meal we drank a bottle of 2009 Don Miguel Gascón Argentine Malbec and for dessert we had Red Velvet Cupcakes from Fresh Market.

I got to say, as good as last years Valentine's Dinner was...this one was even that much better.

"Your Pie" in Savannah

Your Pie, @YourPie, is a new made to order pizza restaurant in the heart of downtown Savannah (located behind Five Guys & Ruth's Chris). The concept here is very simple...everything is fresh and made to your order. You have several different sauces to choose from, several cheeses to add, and then every topping under the sun to put on top of your pizza. Your crust options are white, wheat, and gluten free. The pizzas are then baked thin crust style in a giant open flame brick oven. Our pizza was out to us in under 5 min. Now that is a quick fire! The pizzas are 10" and are perfect size for an individual meal or make a few and share them with everyone at the table.

As for my pizza: I went with a basic marinara sauce, mozzarella cheese, feta cheese, mushrooms, green peppers, capicola, and garlic. This pizza was amazing, but next pizza I get, I might go without the garlic. The garlic pieces on the pizza were huge and I feel like I might be breathing garlic fire for the rest of the weekend. I can't wait to go back and come up with new and creative pizza combos.

My wife got the Caprese Salad in the wheat bread bowl. She added garlic to her salad and had the same complaint as I did. It is just too much. The garlic needs to either be minced or cut into smaller pieces. How they make the bread bowls for the salads was pretty cool as well. They keep a stone bowl in the oven until it is needed to make a bowl (all salad bowls are made to order). The then take the dough and place it over the bowl, which then goes back into the oven. A couple of min later they pop it off and just like that you have the pizza crust bread bowl.

The kids meal (we just got our son a simple cheese pizza) comes with a small gelato. They have about 10 different flavors on hand and we chose to go with the Cookies & Cream. It was also very good and was a nice way to cap off the meal with everyone getting a couple of bites.

All in all it is nice to have a new-fresh dining option in Savannah. These always seem few & far in between. We look forward to going back and wish Your Pie nothing but huge success!

Mellow Mushroom in Statesboro

This is becoming a regular stop for us on our travels between Savannah and Augusta. It really is the nicest looking MM I have ever been in and the menu is different than any other MM as well. We got some garlic cheese bread and half cheese-half mushroom & garlic pizza.

Polka Dot Pig Gastro Pub in Augusta

This is a new restaurant in Augusta that has been open for a month. We decided to give it a shot and it was pretty good. We started off with a White Pizza and an order of Duck Empanadas as our apps. The white pizza is fire cooked with 5 different cheeses, fresh basil, and a garlic pesto. The empanadas were filled with duck, roasted black cherries, and crumbles of goat cheese. Both apps were very good and I would gladly eat them both again. For my main course I got the Chipotle Braised Beef Short Ribs with Jalapeno Mac-n-Cheese and Roasted Corn with Green Chilies. The short ribs were perfect. The mac-n-cheese was different and was on fire with every bite. Not really my cup of tea, but it wasn't horrible. Still, I would have been much happier with the old standard mac-n-cheese. All in all, they have a lot of different tastes on the menu and I would gladly go back. Hopefully though they will have things flowing better and get kinks worked out while shaking off the new restaurant rust. They only had 1 high chair for the entire restaurant (not good with as many tables as they have). Also, our apps came out within 10 min of ordering. We didn't get out main dishes for another 45 min. It was worth the wait, but it shouldn't have taken that long.