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Tag Archives: Martha Stewart

Creamy Sun-Dried Tomato Dip (Barefoot Contessa Lightened Up Just a Bit!)

Recently my editors at Edible Long Island asked what we contributors were doing to eat local in the middle of winter.

Hmmm. Embarrassingly, I am not doing enough. Except drinking Long Island wine and using up the home-grown tomatoes, and CSA peppers, garlic scapes, and berries I froze this past summer when the getting was good. I must do better next year!

This will make an impact at your next party

But, I am reading about cooking local…my godson, Sean, who understands me better than most, got me Ina Garten’s The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook with a forward by Martha Stewart for Christmas. For those who don’t know, The Barefoot Contessa is a specialty food store in East Hampton, Long Island, owned by Ina Garten, a former White House nuclear policy analyst and now Emmy-winning Food Network host. She is very charming, very Hamptons, and that makes her very local to me! Bonus, Martha Stewart also has a home in East Hampton, which makes her local too, at least part of the year.

Anyhoo, I do like Ina Garten and her relaxed style. She’s forever cooking up special treats for her beloved husband, Jeffrey, who seems to enjoy it very much. And since Super Bowl is coming up and that means a lot of entertaining, I adapted one of her signature recipes from the book to what I had in my fridge to see what happened.

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Tags: buffet ideas, cooking, dip, easy party recipes, Edible Long Island, food, Ina Garten, Martha Stewart, recipes, sun-dried tomatoes, Super Bowl

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Categories Edible Long Island, Entertaining, Party Snacks, Recipes, Vegetarian

I’ll Give You Made in China! (Inner Martha vs. Inner McGyver)

7 Aug

Apropos of nothing, I submit to you this story of triumph over adversity that is one of my favorite moments of the summer.

It was one of those brutally hot days in July when my son was at summer camp and I should have been at the beach with my friends, relaxing, except that I needed to put in two window air conditioners and since there was a gentleman painting the deck for my dad, I figured I should jump on the opportunity to get some assistance with the problem. (For all my dear friends who are wondering where this is going…control your excitement. It is NOT going THAT way).

My secret weapon

So we got the window units secured in the window and since I finally had air conditioning, I decided to run out to Home Depot and get a small shelf unit for my son’s toys and finally sort out that awful corner of the room that was making me crazy.

So, I picked out a Martha Stewart nine section shelf, figuring, how hard can it be if it’s Martha? She wouldn’t risk alienating all her devoted fans with instructions that were impossible, would she?

And indeed, everything was progressing very well when I realized that the instructions had left out an important detail about which slabs were finished and which were not and I got caught putting the wrong piece in the wrong spot. So I had to take one shelf out after having hammered it in. That would have been okay, except that in removing the shelf, I broke off the little pegs holding them together. And there were no extra pegs., There were a lot of little white tabs that were meant to cover the screws, but didn’t, but no extra pegs.

S**t, s**t, s**t (and other expletives which don’t belong on a family blog, but which I took great pleasure in spitting out in the absence of the little man). I had a lot to say about Martha Stewart and her devotees, writers of shelving instructions, cheap s**t furniture, stupid Made in China crap…wait a minute…Made in China, Made in China….then I had a look at those pegs and I had my solution:

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Tags: Martha Stewart, McGyver, solutions

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¡Comida Hispana! Recipes to unleash your inner Latino

Mango Mojitos With Ancho Chili Salt

It was another summer Friday in the neighborhood and that called for another festive cocktail. Riding high on the success of last session’s passionfruit mojitos, I decided to make mango mojitos. The drink itself followed much the same construction, but the mango was decidedly sweeter than the passionfruit, so I decided that it needed a […]
Passionfruit Mojitos by the Pitcher or Glass

Summer evenings in the neighborhood can be wonderful. Occasionally on a Friday some of us neighbors bring out folding chairs and sit together in one front yard for a bit of happy hour while the kids go mental on someone else’s lawn. It’s pretty much BYO, but we do mix up a pitcher of experimental […]
KID IN THE KITCHEN: Tembleque (Tropical Coconut Pudding)

We spent the better part of last summer in Puerto Rico, and among the tasty things that my little guy fell in love with was tembleque, a jiggly (temblar means to tremble) dessert that falls somewhere between pudding and flan. I promised him we’d make it back in New York, and this weekend, for a […]
Sangría Tropical (and rainforest paradise pictures)

When the heat gets tropical, so should the drinks. On a recent trip to the mountains of Puerto Rico, I was inspired by a wonderfully cooling and exotic sangría I had up around and about El Yumque (Caribbean National Forest, the only tropical rainforest in the U.S. Forest Service system) at Noelia’s, recommended to us […]
Salmorejo de jueyes (Land Crab Stew)

There are a number of land crab species skittering about Caribbean coastlines. Some are edible and the one we eat most here in Puerto Rico (although I am told they mostly are imported from Venezuela these days) is Cardisoma guanhumi which we call juey and — if you are English-speaking — you might call the […]