An Cooking

Max says this is “the other white meat,”  and that the recipe is also delicious using Grouse,  Ptarmigan, Chicken, or Pork... [I found today that my photograph of Maxs recipe  was nicely featured on 8-14-12 on  http://winemakingtechniques.com/some-simple-easy-wine-recipes]

Posted by Max via Sandra
Prep: 10 mins. |
Cook/Simmer: 2.5 hours

INGREDIENTS:

---Pheasant
· 2 tablespoons olive oil, plus 2 tablespoon butter
· 2 pheasants, cleaned and cut into pieces
· kosher salt and ground pepper to taste

---Vegetables
· ½ onion, chopped
· 1 clove of garlic, minced
· ½ cup celery, chopped
· 10 crimini mushrooms, sliced (not too thin)
· 2 tablespoons butter

---Sauce
· 1 cup ‘good’ white wine
· 2 (10.5 oz.) cans cream of mushroom soup
· 1 tablespoon worcestershire sauce

--Steamed rice, prepared according to directions
--Tomato wedges

METHOD

Add the olive oil and butter in a heavy-bottom skillet and heat to medium-high, and brown the pheasant. Remove to plate, and set aside. In the same skillet, add remaining butter, and toss in the vegetables and saute until onions are translucent. Add the browned pheasant into skillet.

Deglaze with 1 cup of white wine while scraping bottom to release flavorful bits; reduce heat to medium to let wine reduce for 10 minutes. Once wine is reduced, add the cream of mushroom soup and reduce the heat to low; ‘cover’ skillet and let simmer for 2 hours while occasionally stirring.

Serve pheasant in white wine sauce with steamed rice, with sliced tomatoes sprinkled with salt and freshly ground black pepper along side – don’t forget to drink the rest of the wine. - Enjoy!

• White wrapping paper (I bought four rolls because they were fairly small--from Papyrus)
• Decorative paper (gold glitter, gold metallic, white glitter--all from A.C. Moore)
• Scrapbook circle punch 
• Glue dots
• Your imagination
• An appreciation for beauty

For extra punch, I tied a couple of the larger packages with wired, glittery red ribbon.
Its probably the best wrapping anyone has ever done in the history of time.
Has anyone else ever ripped off designed their own wrapping paper before? Have you even wrapped your presents yet?? Why doesnt Target air crazy Target lady commercials year round????

Life just doesnt get any better than when youre eating these tasty steamer clams and sopping up the flavorful sauce with warm crusty bread...

Serves: (4)
Prep Time: 10 min |
Cook Time: 10 min.

Posted: by Sandra

INGREDIENTS

***Steamer Clams:
3 lbs. live steamer clams, cleaned and scrubbed
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
½ medium onion, cut into quarters and julienned
3 cloves garlic, minced
3/4 cup good white wine, I used Pinot Grigio
1 tablespoon fresh basil, chopped (or ½ teaspoon dried)
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste

***Garnish:
1 green onion, chopped
Fresh parsley, chopped
Fresh lemon wedges

--Warm, crusty bread slices for sopping up sauce

METHOD

Place a steam-insert into a large pot, and add water so it is just below it and heat to boiling (this is to let any remaining sand fall to the bottom of pot, not in your sauce).

Meanwhile, heat a large skillet to medium-high, add olive oil and butter until melted, toss in onions; cooking just a few minutes until translucent, add the garlic and cook 30 seconds longer. Add the white wine (remove from heat source beforehand if using gas burners to prevent flare up). Add the basil, kosher salt, and freshly ground pepper; turn heat down to warm.

Reduce heat under large pot to medium-high. Place the steamer clams inside of insert and cook with lid on for about 4 minutes. Remove lid from pot and most steamer clams should be open, and toss any that are not. Remove insert with clams and gently place clams into large skillet with sauce, spooning sauce over them to ensure flavors are distributed throughout, and cook for 1 minute.

Transfer clams with tongs into pasta-type serving bowls, pour sauce over them, garnish with green onions, sprinkle with fresh parsley, and place lemon wedges on the side, including crusty bread slices for dipping. ~ Enjoy!


**********************************

Well white, like black, is a pretty relative term when it comes to tomatoes. I would describe these as a pale, buttery or lemon yellow. Very pretty, and nice as part of plate of mixed tomato colours.

Great White

While this is often sold as an heirloom tomato, it is a fairly recent open pollinated selection, first discovered by the Gleckler Seed Company in the late 1980s, in a batch of Orange Oxheart tomato seed sent to them by a customer. They began selling it in the mid 1990s. In spite of this documented history, a lot of people seem to think it dates back as far as the Civil War era, but they are mistaken. We got our seed from Tatiana.

Great White has rapidly become one of the more popular of the so-called white tomatoes. Many of them are dismissed as bland and uninteresting in flavour, but Great White generates some very positive reports. I have to say I was pleased with it. Im not a big eater of raw tomatoes and I prefer a mild, sweet tomato to one with more traditional flavour. This one manages to do a good balancing act - not so sweet and mild as to be dull, but without the traditional strong acid flavour of dark red tomatoes. Of course, some people will like this more than others! Its dense and firm-fleshed, without a lot of seeds.

We found it a very good producer, and although it came to a premature end (like every single other non-cherry tomato in the garden this year) due to septoria spot, it produced very generously compared to many of the others. The tomatoes are a very large, quite dense beefsteak type tomato - ideal for sandwiches, pizza and the like. Some of them blushed pink on the bottom as they ripened. These are a large, rangy, indeterminate plant (which is why it survived the septoria spot fairly well - all those that survived did so by out-growing it) and it will need lots of room and staking. Its a bit of a late starter, at 85 days. It is said to be crack and drought resistant, and indeed I would say so. We had a very trying year for tomatoes, with a wet, cold June followed by a hot, dry July and and hot-mostly-dry-but-intermittently-quite-wet August. In other words, the exact weather to make tomatoes crack and many of them did. Not Great White. It may have some tendency to Blossom End Rot, but we had no problems with it.

Snow White Cherry

Unlike Great White, I cant find a lot of information about the history of Snow White. Tatiana briefly describes it as having been bred by Joe Bratka of New Jersey, who is a very well known amateur breeder of tomatoes, and who is also known for having introduced some heirloom tomatoes that had been in his family for a long time. So again, its quite a recent tomato but as an unusual open-pollinated variety it tends to make the rounds with the heirlooms. It should be ready in 65 days, so a fair bit quicker than Great White (but thats usually the case with cherry tomatoes).

At any rate, we picked this to grow because like Great White, its widely reckoned to be the best of the white cherry tomatoes. We certainly liked the flavour very much. Like Great White its sweet and mild without being bland. Everyone who has tried it this summer has liked it very much. Most cherry tomato plants make up for their small fruit by growing huge, rangy vines and producing lots of tomatoes, and that was the pattern with Snow White as well. Good staking or trellising is vital! It had the septoria spot as badly as anything else, but like the rest of the cherry tomatoes it has continued to grow new leaves as fast as the septoria destroyed the old ones, and to produce plenty of fruit.

Ive seen it described as crack-resistant, which is to laugh. Id have to say thats the one flaw - it cracks like peanuts at an elephants party. It was quite a lot of effort to find a handful of uncracked tomatoes for the photo. Like I said, we had the ideal weather for cracking tomatoes, but I also have to say that given the opportunity to crack, it took it. This has been a problem in general with the cherry tomatoes this year, but some have done much better. Ildi, for instance, and Black Cherry. Nevertheless, Id be inclined to grow this again. Weve been drying a lot of them. Well see what we think of that.