Amy Currioman » Food

Calm before the storm

Amy — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 09:50:39 +0000

Well, here it is, Christmas morning and so far the house is still quiet. There are no longer young children that waken the adults at the crack of dawn with cries of “Santa came!” Such memories are sweet, but I do enjoy being able to drink my morning tea while starting to prepare our traditional holiday morning cinnamon buns. I won’t wake anyone else until I’ve finished making them and put the turkey in the oven. Once everyone else gets up, it will be a busy, noisy, joyous day.

Merry Christmas to all!

New traditions

Amy — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:47:31 +0000

I was asked by my mother to host the family Christmas dinner at my house this year. I’ve been hosting the family dinner here every year for the past several years and I really would prefer to go out to eat Christmas dinner at a restaurant. Having around twenty people here is not an easy task. My hubby and kids don’t want the dinner here, so they mope and complain about it. There are other family members that only come here out of a sense of duty, and you can tell that they would rather be at their own homes celebrating inside a bottle. Still others simply say that they want to start new traditions with their own family that don’t include being with the rest of “our” family. Is every single family this dysfunctional?

I’m thinking about trying to start a new tradition at the dinner that would make everyone happy that they came. I just don’t know yet what that will be. Maybe starting a food fight!

Pizza night

Amy — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:12:58 +0000

Well, it’s Pizza night! We like to eat pizza on Friday nights. If we can afford to buy take-out pizza we do that. Our favorite take-out pizza is Pizza Hut’s pan pizza; we like to order the meat-lover’s pizza and an order of their cheese bread sticks. If someone is working in town, or has to go into town for some other reason, we’ll consider doing Pizza Hut for pizza night.

If not, then we go to the freezer and take out a DiGiorno’s Rising dough three meant pizza and cook it at home. It’s almost as good as Pizza Hut, and it’s more economical, so we’ve been doing that a lot more often lately. And it’s faster to cook one of those than it is to send someone into town to get a take-out pizza. I make sure to line the pizza pan with aluminum foil before cooking the pizza so that afterwards I just throw the foil away and have no pan to cook, so that makes it easy to clean-up afterwards too!

Tonight is a DiGiorno’s night – it’s cooking right now as I’m typing. It sure smells yummy!

Using color to influence people

Amy — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 22:28:59 +0000

Over the years I’ve learned some interesting things about tricks restaurants use on their customers. A long time ago I read some literature about how different colors effect different moods. For example, red, yellow and orange are “high energy” colors and are often used in fast food restaurants because the restaurants know that those colors will encourage the customers to eat quickly and leave (making room for more customers) and the “high end” restaurants will often use “calming” colors such as blues and greens to encourage their customers to linger longer (perhaps order more alcohol which is their big money maker) and order dessert, relaxing and enjoying their meal and the company they are keeping.

I was just reading an article on the Time.com website about “what makes you eat more food” and was surprised to read that one of the things that makes you eat more food in restaurants is that most restaurants turn their thermometers to cooler temperatures. When the body is cold, a natural reaction to warm up is to eat more food. So the restaurants are trying to get you to eat more food by making their customers cold!

I hate when that happens

Amy — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:44:22 +0000

Do you ever feel hungry but don’t want to eat anything? That happens to me all the time! My stomach is growling and my hands start to tremble, and I even get a hunger headache! But I don’t want to eat anything – nothing appeals to me! This is a dangerous time because now is the time that I would probably grab some empty-calorie type of snack just to head off the hunger pains! I’d love to be able to grab an apple – we were given a ton of them recently, but for some crazy reason ten minutes after I’ve eaten an apple I feel hungrier than I did before I ate it! Sounds crazy, right?

English muffin bread

Amy — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 18:33:07 +0000

Well today I decided to buy some cornmeal to try and make english muffin bread in the bread machine. I went to the new Harris Teeter store and bought way more groceries than I intended to buy! It’s hard to resist all of the BOGO specials and the double coupon offers!

Anyway, now I’m home and am cooking the bread in the machine. I’m anxious to give it a try! I remember about 30 years ago a friend gave me some english muffin bread that she had made from scratch. It was really good!

I don’t like green tea

Amy — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 18:08:20 +0000

The first time I tried a green tea it was shortly after my arrival on Monhegan Island after a very bumpy boat ride. My stomach was rather queasy but my friends told me that if I got some food on my stomach that I’d start feeling better pretty quickly. So we went to a restaurant to have breakfast and the only tea they had available to drink was green tea. I’d never tried green tea before and I don’t like coffee so I went ahead and decided to try the green tea. I asked the server what most people put in their tea and she smiled and said that most people will drink it plain. I tried a sip of it; it was really nasty so I tried putting sugar and cream in it and it still tasted really nasty.

BBQ at DQ

Amy — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 11:42:27 +0000

Yesterday afternoon I had to run into town unexpectedly and invited my hubby to join me. We don’t get very much time to spend together, so when I have errands to run I invite him so that we can spend time together in the car and maybe end up grabbing a bite to eat someplace inexpensive. I know it’s sad, but you have to learn to squeeze in time when you can!

Anyway, I told him that we could stop in at DQ and buy some of his favorite Dilly Bars on the way home. Well, that didn’t take much prodding – he LOVES those Dilly Bars!

I’ve never been a big fan of DQ – I think it is because I suffered from sticker shock that year when I bought an ice cream cake for my hubby when we first got together.

But when we went inside to buy his Dilly Bars, I was hungry and realized it was lunch time, so I looked at the menu and saw that they sold BBQ sandwiches. I asked my hubby if he wanted to share one with me, and he said sure. So I ordered a combo meal BBQ sandwich with two drinks and we cut it in half and shared the meal. It was actually a very good sandwich! We’ll have to do that again!

Orange Juice

Amy — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 06:32:19 +0000

A lot of people drink orange juice every morning. Its how they start their day.

I prefer a nice cup of coffee in the morning and rarely drink orange juice. When I was very young, I would drink orange juice in the morning. my parents were not big coffee drinkers at home. We all drank either a bi glass of orange juice or a glass of whole milk with our breakfast. My parents would wait until they got to work to have their first cup of coffee.

But I want my coffee first thing in the morning. And pleasse don’t talk to me until I have had at least one or two sips.

By the skin of our teeth

Amy — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 02:55:01 +0000

We had some unexpected company drop by this afternoon, and it was obvious that they were planning on staying for dinner. I really had not made any plans for dinner; I was hoping my hubby was going to take me out to eat!

Well, we had a pork tenderloin roast in the refrigerator so we decided to cook that. We rubbed it with butter, and sprinkled it with some Mrs Dash and put a half jar of orange marmalade on it. We also had the usual sides of taters & veggies. The roast came out quite well and there weren’t any leftovers. So that speaks for itself! I’ll never be able to do that one again, I didn’t write anything down or measure anything! Oh well…..