Mostly Food!

Time for a short break from my long and wordy blog posts… My problem is that whenever I write about historical items, I research each of them and then I feel that I ‘have to share’ what I have found.  I realize that its overkill for many readers but all that work makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something…

Still, even I welcome a break by focusing on a narrow topic…especially food and restaurants.  Hence this particular posting! 

Recently Laurie and I were shopping at our local Ingles Supermarket.  We were looking at chicken…roasters specifically.  Laurie remembered seeing a ‘spatchcocked’ whole chicken on a food show and she decided to ask the butcher to prepare one for us…splitting it open so that the 2 halves would be ready for roasting. (Much like ‘butterflying’ a thick steak)

We can verify that roasting a ‘spatchcocked’ bird achieves 3 objectives.  You end up with a bird that has nice crisp flavorful skin all over the outside, the meat is moist and significantly less time is required to roast a whole chicken.  

There is one downside… For someone like me who isn’t too coordinated and who is used to completing a function in a certain way, I did a lousy job of carving the 2 flat halves for our dinner.

FYI, 'spatchcock' is perhaps short for or a combination of ‘dispatch and cock’, that is a cock/chicken that has been killed and dressed in a summary manner.  

Now you might think that French toast doesn’t deserve to be included in a food post as its nothing special.  But it was a food ‘landmark’ to us…as we couldn’t remember ever making/eating French toast at home!  FYI, we used a nice Brioche bread for our version.

As anyone who reads my blog site knows, for me it’s all about breakfast!  On this occasion I was able to make one of my favorite morning meals.  Laurie had made salmon patties a day or two earlier and we had 2 left over.  

I reheated them in butter in a frying pan and then of course, I topped them with a couple of easy over eggs!  I would highly recommend this breakfast as the egg yolk really complements the salmon patties, blending in with them nicely, making them a bit creamy.

We love fried chicken!  Our favorite restaurant fried chicken at the moment is Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken.  However we recently discovered, (after living here in East Tennessee for more than 10 years), that our local Ingles Supermarket in Lenoir City serves up some very flavorful and moist fried chicken on a daily basis.  It’s great to take home!  

The Ingles website can be found at https://www.ingles-markets.com/.

More healthy food!  The other evening we had a serious craving for donuts and related products… We decided to get up early the next morning and call the donut shop to ensure that they would set aside a couple of Laurie’s favorites…the cheese Danish.

We don’t get up early for much these days, but the next morning we were up, and after Laurie’s call, we headed over to Master Donuts in Lenoir City Tennessee.  As you can see, we ‘may have’ gone a bit overboard!  We had 4 Danish (cheese and fruit, 2 old fashioned glazed donuts, a regular glazed donut, a cinnamon roll and 2 apple fritters.  Master Donut threw in that chocolate frosted donut as a bonus.

FYI, it did take us 3 days to finish off this cache of goodness!  In our opinion, Master Donut (a local chain) blows away all of their competitors… Check out Master Donuts in Lenoir City.  They are on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Masterdonutstn/.

We recently had an early dinner at a restaurant in Townsend Tennessee.  “Unfortunately”, Laurie was unable to finish her ribeye steak so I ‘had to’ take it home for a future breakfast.

 

“Waste not, want not” is a saying I try to live by, but of course I’d be better off if I didn’t.  In any case, I wasn’t going to waste the leftover steak or the slice of Texas toast that had accompanied it!  I ‘spatchcocked’/split the steak lengthwise in order to obtain 2 thin slices of beef that would cover the toast.  Then I heated the steak and toast in butter in the frying pan, placed the sliced steak on the toast and buried it all under 2 easy-over eggs.  It was a tasty start to the day!

…and I’ll end with a couple of non-food photos!

Laurie captured a couple nice photos of a young deer grazing through the rear portion of our back yard under the big oak tree.  Mom is watching from behind one of our big backyard boulders.  The critters like that boulder as it has a natural depression that holds water and that youngster was just snacking on the remnants of the oak tree’s bumper acorn crop!

That’s all for now.  Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave