Welcome to the Cooking with C.C. Blog. I will be discussing all things food and travel related. Be sure to join me for information from recipes, cookbooks, restaurants and places to visit. I look forward to hearing from you!
Huntsville Restaurant Week
This week is Huntsville Restaurant Week 2015. For 10 days, participating restaurants have fixed price menu specials for lunch and/or dinner. Lunch specials are $5, $10 or $15 and include a main course with an appetizer or dessert. The dinner specials run $10, $20 or $30 and include an appetizer, main course and a dessert. With more than 60 business participating, you are sure to find something for everyone. For the list of restaurants and the menus, see the Huntsville Restaurant Week website. We decided to venture out for BBQ. There are several BBQ restaurants participating including Lawlers and New Market BBQ. Since Lawlers is closer to our house, we headed to Lawlers for their restaurant week special - a pork plate with two sides, large drink and pecan or chocolate pie for $10. Huntsville has also seen a marked increase in food trucks. Many years ago, food trucks were not seen as a source of gourmet or cutting edge food - they were more for basic, cheap lunch food. Places like Portland Oregon have institutionalized food trucks by creating "pods" or permanent places for food trucks to park. The new crop of Huntsville food trucks has brought an amazing…
The best way to learn more about wine
Aristotle said that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." This statement holds true when we combine different flavors and dishes. It also applies to pairing wines with food. It's not just the flavors that create the synergy, but also other aspects of the pairing. An acidic chenin blanc with certain fish, a big cabernet with a great steak and many more. There are several steps in learning about all of these flavors - an important step is to learn about how wine is made and the different elements of the wine and how that interacts with different flavors. My first real experience with wine was while I was traveling in Europe and visited a winery on the Mosel with a friend of mine who had moved back to Germany. The winery was owned by some of his relatives. When we arrived, I was treated as an honored guest and they had me try a number of their wines, pulling out some of their best Rieslings. The family has been growing grapes and making wines at the same location since the 1500's. After we tasted, they invited us upstairs (their house was above the wine storage and…
25th Anniversary Celebration
When we talked about a quick get away for our anniversary and decided to go up to Franklin TN. We go up to the Nashville area on a regular basis and Lori's office is in Franklin, so we have a lot of favorites up there. We can be in Franklin in about an hour from our house (if traffic isn't bad). Lori had not been out to Leipers Fork before, so we started our day there. It's a nice little area in the countryside outside of Franklin. We went several other places before heading into downtown Franklin for our dinner. We first stopped at the Savory Spice Shop. This is an independent shop similar to Penzey's or the Spice House. The selection was excellent and I was impressed with the store. I highly recommend a stop if you are in the area or check out their website at www.savoryspiceshop.com. We headed to our reservation (Highly recommend Open Table Reservation) at Cork & Cow. Cork & Cow is a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence winner and focuses on .... can you guess???? ..... steak! The menu has a wide variety of steak, and includes a rack of lamb, pork chop and…
Hilton Head Vacation Restaurants
As I included in last week's post, we recently spent almost a week vacationing in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. I was looking forward to some great dinners and especially seafood and the restaurants we visited certainly did not disappoint. Our previous trips were quick trips for a weekend event with Carly in November, right before Thanksgiving. What little free time we had, we were used to walking up to places and just being whisked in and seated. Not the case in the middle of the summer! Many places didn't take reservations, but some did. We had been to the Skull Creek Boathouse on one of our previous trips and it was one of our favorites from the November trips. We headed over for dinner a little after 6PM on our first day there (Monday) and the parking lot was packed. We parked and walked to the restaurant and were told that the wait was 3 hours. Well, I'm not waiting 3 hours. They did tell us that if we got there by 4:30-5:00 the crowd wasn't there - noted.... Off we went to find another place for dinner. We ended up stopping at a very nice seafood restaurant in…