Passover Seder, Vietnamese Claypot Ginger Chicken, Flan-o Perfecto, & Birthday Bling?

Last night (Monday) was Erev Pesach (the evening on which Passover begins), and Dan and I made a lovely Passover Seder at the Elkhorn Inn:

We had handmade Shmurah Matzah (THE best matzah!) from Chabad of Morgantown, West Virginia, and that made it a VERY special Passover, indeed! This is the second year Rabbi Zalman & Hindy Gurevitz from Chabad Morgantown have sent us Shmurah Matzah, and it truly makes our Passover wonderful! We used the beautiful Seder plate given to us by our dear Irish friend, Megan; the pussy willows & forsythia were from the Elkhorn Inn garden; our hand-embroidered coasters were from our amazing honeymoon in the Central Highlands of Vietnam; my prayerbook was my Dad's mom's, and our Manischevitz wine was from the Kimball, WV WalMart!  I made the Charoses (a yummy mixture of apples, almonds, and wine), that is eaten on Matzah as part of the Seder service, and Dan got the horesradish, and other foods we needed for our Seder plate; the herbs came from our windowsill garden!

Make no mistake: I am NOT a Chef.  Dan is the Chef.  I can basically follow recipes, "potchkee", doctor and tweak them- but I truly impressed even myself Monday night!

For our Seder dinner I made Vietnamese Claypot Ginger Chicken from Mai Pham's wonderful  "Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table" cookbook, as it's a great Kosher recipe:

basically chicken, ginger, garlic, Thai chilis, scallions, & a bit of brown sugar; the claypot gives the dish a wonderful smokeyness, and it's wonderful served over rice; it turned out SO good, in fact, that we've put it on the Elkhorn Inn's menu!

You can see the Elkhorn Inn's new 2010 menu

here, on our Facebook "fan" page under "Notes".

We treated ourselves to Freemark Abbey 2006 Viognier, one of the "Wines of the World" that the puppies had bought Dan for "Dogfather's Day" on http://wine.com, and it was Superb with the spicy ginger chicken! This is Definitely a wine we'd love to buy more of...

We then REALLY treated ourselves to a desert of the great banana and guava wines we brought back from  Vino Del Grotto in St. Augustine, Florida- tropic summer in a bottle! Neither is too sweet, as fruit wines are wont to be; the Guava wine would be an excellent accompanyment to a spicy, tropical dinner, & the banana wine is Fabulously Banana-y! And we WILL be ordering at least a case of their wines as soon as we can!

After this fete of culinary extravagance, Suzie Homemaker Not then Totally Outdid Herself, and made a Vietnamese flan (also from Mai Pham's cookbook), which is creamier than the more dense Spanish version; it's more like a creme brulee than a flan- and it was Excellent! Flan is a Very tricky thing to do right, and as I was able to do it spot-on my very first time, this means that: a) Mai Pham's recipe is Really good, & b) I CAN (contrary to popular belief) Follow Directions! LOL

I pulled about 10 different flan recipes before I attempted Mai Pham's, & I learned something REALLY cool from the www.ElBoricua.com recipe for  Puerto Rican flan: Instead of trying to make the caramel sauce in a pot (with the resultant mess of hardened or burnt sugar), you put sugar and water in the bottom of each ramekin (they must be both oven and microwave safe) and then put them in the microwave for approx. 2 1/2 minutes (you must watch them VERY carefully!), and you make the caramel sauce in each little ramekin! Pull them from the mircrowave the Second they turn light brown, let them cool, & then pour in your custard mixture through a strainer. Then you bake them in a "Bain Marie" (a pan of water) and Voilla!: Flan-o Perfecto!  If I can do this, ANYONE can do this!

As loyal readers of this blog know, April Fools Day is my 51st birthday, but I'm not finding it Nearly as depressing as 50.  LOL (I didn't find 40 NEARLY as depressing as 38, either...) I am therefore not planning to do or buy myself anything extravagant- although I Did treat myself to a ProPlay golf club handle/glove set & a cool (pre-loved) Helen Welsh "pony" zebra handbag on eBay, and am Hoping Dan & I get a chance to have a celebratory sushi-saki fest @ Kimono in Princeton...) I Am, however, still hunting for an engagement ring to replace the one I lost doing laundry, and so was back this week on DiamondNexus, in the Continuing Saga of Elisse's Great Ring Hunt. I, at 50, have been truly suckered in by the "Journey Jewelry" ad campaigns, which tout a string or a circle of diamonds, each one representing a 'milestone' in one's life. Having passed more than a few milestones to date, I find that concept Extremely appealing, and when I found the "Emotions" pendants on DiamondNexus, I began to think that maybe I want one of those, too!

Once you get to 40 or 50 (or 60 or 70 or 80 or 90...) and you have a few milestones to commemorate, the idea of a Journey Pendant is Very appealing. Whether it's kids or pets or jobs, military service or marriages or divorces (LOL), countries traveled to, illnesses survived, or houses owned (or all of the above, LOL), at some point it hits you that you Have been on- and are still on- a "journey", that life is, essentially, a "journey", and that it would be Really Cool to celebrate it all (or at least a few of them) in diamonds! 

What is cool about DiamondNexus is that while a diamond Journey pendant with stones of any size would be obscenely expensive, (and my journey has been Livin' Large, so I want Big Rocks! LOL), theirs, beautifully & perfectly set in 14k white or yellow gold, are actually affordable! (And Boo-Boo wants a 3.2 carat one, to be sure!) And they have them with emerald, ruby, saphhire, & chocolate gems, too!

And as someone who's mom has fought- successfully, B"H- the fight against breast cancer, and who has/had many friends and loved ones affected by this horrid disease, I LOVE that DiamondNexus has a 7-stone rose-pink "Journey of Healing" pendant, and that $200 from the sale of each pendant and chain set goes towards funding the fight against breast cancer.

Click here to check them out!

I will close this post with a couple of photos that prove that it really Is, Actually and Truly, Spring, here in Landgraff, WV:

Flatfootin', Green Boas, Beer, & Bling, and Chicken w/Pinot Noir & Cherries...

This is my absolute favorite photo from St. Paddy's night in Bluefield WV:  Chef Dan, The Other Dan, and Terry (a.k.a. BluefieldView), flatfootin' outside Gary Bowling's House of Art, to the banjo, guitar, & uke of the great George Robertson Band playing "Fox on the Run"...
We had a really fun evening, both at GBHoA and then at the Ramsey School Club, where we 'did the green thing': green beer, Dan's green sweater, my green feather boa (made possible by 50 Chinese chickens...), a little dancing on the bar (!), and Waaaaaaaay too much Jameson's Irish whisky!
For decades I have proclaimed (boastfully) what I learned from my mother: that Irish doesn't give one the hangover that Scotch does. And for decades it was true- at least for me. But it isn't any more. (!)
I spent Thursday "recovering" from the classic St. Paddy's Hangover From Hell, but now I feel fine. :-)

                

Prior to "indulging", Dan & I had ourselves Made Gorgeous at Hair Studio, the Aveda Salon & Day Spa in Princeton. Hair Studio is rather a Big Deal for me, as it was the first (and remains the only) salon I've been to in West Virignia that has stylists and colorists who KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING. This is truly no small thing. I will never, Ever forget sobbing and screaming in a parking lot after having Positively The Worst Haircut In The Known Universe at a mall in Beckley, and another almost-as-bad experience in another mall, where the stylist sneered at me and rolled her eyes when I tried to describe what I wanted- silky-smooth, glass-like blowdried hair- as opposed to the sticky, hardened mess of  "product" she had gummed me up with... And so Hair Studio remains Truly one of the great Good Things in my life. It's also the ONLY salon & day spa in our area that we send Elkhorn Inn guests to, because we KNOW they will be happy! My "Big 5-1" is coming up in about 10 days, and so it was time for me to get my hair properly cut and colored, and they did a grand job (as usual), totally disappearing the gray and giving me dramatic, shiny blond and red highlights & lowlights & a youthful, swingy cut. Dan didn't even fight me when I made an appt. for him to have his hair cut there, too! :-) I then did a Full Makeup, including, yes, Eyeliner, and we headed for the Mercer Mall, where Dan decided I simply Had to have the $9 Electric Kelly Green feather boa pictured above! Suitably decked out for St. Pats, we then headed out for our Night on The Town!

The only thing missing from my St. Pat's outfit, was, of course, a Big Green Rock, and when we got home I went to  DiamondNexus and found some fairly fabulous "emeralds"...  I love their Stephanie earrings with the emerald drops, especially in 14k yellow gold, and I can Definitely see myself wearing them- and not just on St. Patrick's Day!- BUT they're only for pierced ears (like most fine earrings, nowadays) and I don't have pierced ears! So... I kept looking amongst the emeralds and found they have my Favorite ring- the  "Nobility"  "Wisdom of the Heart" ring- the one that's hinged and opens up so you can engrave it inside- with a .30 round, brilliant cut emerald! I truly think their "Wisdom of the Heart" rings are The neatest things, and I'm pretty set on getting one to replace my engagement ring that got lost when I was doing laundry... I've showed it to Dan, and so far he isn't fighting me on it... :-)

Tonight Chef Dan did a "dress rehearsal" for our May 28-30 "Dueling Dining Car Chefs" Weekend, and I got to play "resident foodie"! Dan prepared "Chicken with Pinot Noir & Cherry Sauce" from James Porterfield's excellent cookbook "From the Dining Car"- and it was WONDERFUL! This will definitely be Chef Dan's entree for his menu for our gourmet railfan throwdown! James Porterfield is preparing his menu, as well, and as soon as both menus are finalized we will add them to the "Events" listing on the Elkhorn Inn's Facebook "fan" page http://wvurl.com/dOX 

The recipe calls for dried cherries, and since that's not something one can find in the grocery stores of southern West Virginia, we ordered Montmorency cherries from The Cherry Stop   www.cherrystop.com in Michigan (I Facebook & Tweet with them, too: @cherrystop).

The other thing I did this week was continue to research wines for our

May 14-16 "WV Wine Tasting Weekend", and from over 20 wineries throughout the state, we've already short-listed several really great ones!

And our Wine Weekend is now FEATURED on LocalWineEvents! Please check it out & give us a call

at 1-800-708-2040!

On a personl note, the Undisputed Sweepstakes Queen of Landgraff, WV won herself an amazing office chair from www.sitbetter.com  As my loyal readers know, last week I got the fabulous Santana "shooties" I won from Princess Dominique's fashion blog, and hot on the heels of that win I got an email telling me I'd won the Posture Perfect Evolution Excercise Ball Chair which is a 55 cm diameter Anti-Burst Ball, that comes with a pump, locking casters, height-adjustable pegs, & a sturdy polyurethane base- AND the ball is removable "for use in a variety of exercises"! When I entered the contest this is the chair I told them I'd really like to try, because a) it looks SO cool, but b), and most importantly, it was created for dental techs who spend umpteen hours sitting hunched over the way I do at my computer, and I figured that if it helps Their back pain, maybe it will help mine! The Sitbetter folks have assured me that my bouncing baby ball chair is on its way, and I can't wait to get it! And after we pump it up, I obviously HAVE to get Dan to photograph me sitting on it in my "Shooties"!