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!
Lemon Curd
When we did the Afternoon Tea class last Sunday, we made Lemon Curd as one of the recipes. We made some pastry crips to spread it on, but it's often served with Scones or put in crusts to make small tartlets. It's hard to believe that four ingredients can make something so tasty. The recipe is not hard, it is not without risk.....you are trying to get a sweet-tart fruit spread and not lemony scrambled eggs. (If you want to see a Cream Scone recipe, click here.) Lemon Curd first appeared in England in the early 1800's. In those days, it was difficult to zest citrus as they didn't have the versatile microplane grates we have today. Plus, the sugar came in hard pieces that you would use to rub the outside of the lemons to get the zest and essential oils. It was sometimes called Lemon Cheese and used in a variety of means. Another early method was to combine the lemon with cream and literally produce curds that were then separated from the whey. However it came it pass, it is a recipe that everyone should have in their arsenal. Like I said, it only has four ingredients -…
Cork and Crust Revisited
It's always interesting writing up our experiences at different restaurants. After writing on our meals at several restaurants, I had a reader tell me that they did not have a great experience at one of the restaurants I had reviewed on the blog a while back. Lori wanted to go out Saturday night so we went back to Cork and Crust in Madison since I wanted to check them out again having only been there once. (See previous post here.) Carly had a friend over, so the 4 of us headed there for dinner. Lori called ahead to get a reservation. The challenge when writing about restaurants is that even the best places can have a bad day or the customer may have expectations that can't be met. When someone goes to a restaurant on my recommendation and then has a less than fabulous experience I get nervous.....I don't focus on restaurant reviews, but I do like to share about our experiences. (For more restaurant reviews, check out my friends at Huntsville Eats.) So we headed back to Cork and Crust - this time I was going to eat something other than pizza. We arrived a few minutes early and the…
Georgetown Tour – Part 2
This post is the second part about our tour of Georgetown - for the first part, click here. I had the opportunity to travel to Washington DC in late March for the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) 2015 annual conference. The conference always has optional day tours of the area for the first day of the conference. I decided to take the Tour of Georgetown. This tour was organized by the Georgetown Business Improvement District (www.georgetowndc.com). I covered our first two stops at Pizza Paradiso and the Hotel Capella last week. Our last two stops were at the Fiola Mare Restaurant. There were two things in the tour description that caught my interest - learning to make pizza at Pizza Paradiso and learning how to filet a whole cooked fish tableside at Fiola Mare. If you remember our trip to Las Vegas from last summer, we had an incredible experience with a salt crusted whole fish (Post is here if you don't remember....). When they brought the fish to our table and our waiter proceeded to filet the fish for Lori and I, I was very intrigued. I've read about cooking whole fish as being one of the best…
Georgetown Tour – Part 1
The IACP 2015 Annual Conference was held in Washington, D.C. this year. There are always optional city tours on the first day of the conference and out of all of the options, I chose the Georgetown Tour. We visited 4 different places in Georgetown as part of the tour. This is the first year that Lori went with me on the tour. She always travels with me when I attend the conference, but she normally is out shopping. We had a grand time on the tour - learned a number of things, ate some really good food and enjoyed some very nice beverages. Because I have so many pictures, I'm going to break our day up into two posts. In this post, I'm going to show you our stops at Pizza Paradiso and the Hotel Capella. Pizza Paradiso is one of the top pizza places in D.C. Ruth Gresser is the owner and head chef at PP. Our group had the basement of the restaurant to ourselves for our pizza making and class. They brought us pizza dough for us to make our own pizzas. We had three types of sauce to choose from as our start - tomato sauce,…