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!
Bravo Bridge Street Review
While I prefer a great local restaurant over a chain, there are some chains that I do enjoy. I am glad to see Huntsville starting to have some of the higher end chains opening in Huntsville. There are two new ones at Bridge Street that have recently opened joining P.F. Changs to provide more excellent options for Huntsville diners. These two are Texas de Brazil and Bravo! Cucina Itlaiana. I've eaten at other locations of both of these in the past. Lori and I attempted to try Bravo a few weeks back only to be met with a 3 1/2 hour wait - sorry - I don't wait 3 1/2 hours to eat dinner.... My daughter's birthday was last week, so she wanted to try Bravo. I went to OpenTable to see about getting a reservation. Well, we had two choices - 3:45 or 9:15 - it looked like an early dinner for us! First lesson - plan ahead, get a reservation. When we showed up at 3:45, people walking in were being quoted at least a 1 hour wait. The other advantage to the early dinner was that the lunch menu is served until 4PM, so our early dinner…
Arista Food & Wine Experience
Lori and I always enjoy when we have the opportunity to spend a few day in Napa and Sonoma Valleys in the California Wine Country. While I know there are many wonderful wineries across many states, Napa and Sonoma are the epi-center of wine in the United States. There are about 400 wineries in both Napa and Sonoma - more than you can visit in a few days. Many of the wineries are small family owned businesses. When we go out to visit, we like to mix in visits to favorite wineries with new places we haven't visited before. On one of our early trips, we were exploring the Sonoma Valley and first visited Arista Winery on West Side Road. Arista is one of those family owned estates run be several generations of the McWilliams family. We had the opportunity to try most of the wine they produce and brought some home with us on that trip. Since then, we continue to order from Arista when our favorites are offered. In one of the "A-List" newsletters, they talked about the "Food and Wine" experience that is offered to the A-List members. We had the opportunity to enjoy this on our…
Easy Scones
As I mentioned in last week's post, we had a group o 7th grade girls spend the weekend with us as part of the DNow program for our church's youth group. I made breakfast for the group which included Cinnamon Rolls (See last week's post for recipe) and Scones. Scones are very easy to make and only require that you have a food processor. (If you don't have one, it's still not that complicated, but would require some work!). This is a very nice recipe as you can modify it to flavor whatever you want to. This scone recipe really is a blank canvas. I've included a lemon glaze recipe, but you could also use the same glaze as the Cinnamon Rolls. For these though, I topped with some sugar and left them plain. You can serve with a good jelly, jam or preserve (or at our house, normally that means Nutella....). If you want to go all Downton Abbey, then find some clotted cream at a specialty or gourmet food store. As far as adding flavors to the dough, you can add at the same time you add the whipping cream. A small amount of lemon or orange zest,…
Cinnamon Rolls
One of my favorite class series has been the "Holiday Breakfast" series that we teach in November every year. The Cinnamon Rolls are always a big hit! I make these on a regular basis especially when I need breakfast for a number of people. These are very easy to make the night before, then pull them out and stick them in the oven. I've made these for Sunday Schools breakfasts, for work, for Carly for school - about anytime we need to have food for a group of people in the morning. That was part of my plan for this weekend as we were hosting for DNow with our church's youth group. We had 11 7th grade girls plus their leaders staying with us for the weekend and I was making breakfast for them on Saturday morning. The pictures I'm showing I took while I made these cinnamon rolls for them Friday night and baking Saturday morning. What I hadn't counted on was my kidney stones deciding to act up Friday night. (Sorry if that's TMI....) Having these ready to pop in the oven so I could get breakfast ready while in just a bit of pain was fabulous! Anyway…