Author: Smgross1947
Hello hello, again, Foodie Friends 🙂 Hope you had a great weekend! For this edition of Foodie Adventures, join us at Mac’s Speed Shop for our Friday Night date, a recap of Mother’s Day last weekend with mom, two brand new recipe from our Colombian Puree Project, and making homemade lasagna!
Hello again, Foodie Friends 🙂 Check out this list for every restaurant offering new outdoor seating options in the Upstate, SC area to #killcovidnotsmallbiz!
Restaurants Opening Outdoor Seating
Upstate South Carolina
With the governor beginning to slowly open up the state again, I wanted to provide you all an update, with the help of GVL Today’s post and comments from fellow Upstate South Carolinians, as to which restaurants are now adding or opening (social distancing friendly – 8 feet apart) outdoor dining to patrons.
*Side note: For all those looking for a great place doing Mother’s Day meals this weekend, see the link from our friend Kristina at Kidding Around Greenville here!
Now, back to our regularly scheduled list 😁
(will be updated here as more are added):
So looking forward to going out to eat again! Sound out in the comments below and let me know your suggestions of places we may have missed or should visit next. As always, feel free to like, comment, & share 🤗
Hello hello, again, Foodie Friends 🙂 Hope you had a great weekend! For this edition of Foodie Adventures, join us for Friday Night Pizza at Brooklyn’s Pizza & Wings, a brand new Colombian Puree Project, and making homemade Rosemary, Roasted Garlic, & Olive Oil bread!
Friday was a great day for pizza, and the one thing I miss about living in the South is great New York style pizza. Huge slices, a little sweeter tomato sauce, and thin crust – but still thick enough to dunk into things – and not make you feel like there’s a bread stick attached to the back of the pizza.
I remembered finding this place when I was doing research for my Restaurant Updates/takeout food blog (see that link here). I’ve tried some New York style pizza places in the Upstate and I haven’t found one I’ve really liked yet – until this one!!
It was located right near where Pelham Rd. started and met up with East North Street in Greenville.
There were a ton of pizzas to choose from, which all sounded awesome, and Jamie and I narrowed it down to either the Brooklyn Bridge (Italian sausage, pepparoni, ham, sliced meatballs, green peppers, onions, mushrooms, and black olives) or the Manhattan (Chicken, sundried tomato, pesto, roasted red peppers, and parmesean). We ended up going with the former and saving the latter for another visit!
It was absolutely delish! The perfect sauce, savory but still slightly sweet, the crust was awesome, and there were definitely no leftovers in sight. We are big fans!!😋🍕
It was the perfect thing to go along with us watching the Parks and Rec Quarantine Reunion Special, which ended up raising over $2.8 million for Feeding America’s COVID-19 relief fund. If you would like to help give to this worthy cause, please visit the link here!
“For every dollar donated to Feeding America through this form, State Farm, Subaru of America, NBC Universal and the “Parks and Recreation” writers/producers/cast will collectively give $1 up to a maximum matching donation of $500,000 through May 21, 2020.”
Copyright © 2020 Feeding America
I was contacted a couple months ago on Instagram by a sweet lady named Ximena from a company called Wislla Distribution out of Bogata, Columbia. She loved my blogs about baking, and offered to send me some samples of their exotic fruit purées to try (for free 😁) in exchange for reviewing them on the blog!
I was quite surprised when the box I grabbed from our package locker was 16 pounds! 😂😍
The below flavors are what we recieved in the mail:
These are pure fruit purées, with only natural ascorbic acid (also known as Vitamin C) added to help preserve them, and can be stored at room temperature for up to six months.
This was a lot of purées, even for me, so I ended up tagging in my good friend, fellow food writer, and neighbor Madison to help in our procured purée preparations! 🙌👩🏻🍳👩🏻🍳
Our initial recipe ideas we came up with are below, so get excited for a lot of new recipes in the near future for this Purée Project! If you have any other ones you could send us for suggestions, message us or leave a comment below:
Rosemary, Roasted Garlic, & Olive Oil Bread
Greenville, SC
Recipe from House of Nash Eats Food Blog!
To pivot a little, if any of you asked me what my favorite Italian chain restaurant is, I’d probably tell you Macaroni Grill. It holds a special place in my heart for a few reasons.
My first two years of college in Maryland, I lived about 30 minutes from home, and just about once a month, my dad would meet me in the middle to come visit and take me out for lunch. The place? Macaroni Grill, of course! My favorite part (besides hanging out with Dad, obviously)? THE BREAD.
Macaroni Grill is known for their famous Rosemary Olive Oil bread, a crispy outside and soft inside, perfect for dipping in that seasoned olive oil mixture. Since I started baking more sweet breads in my bread maker, I wanted to try something a little more savory, and this was the first flavor that popped into my head.
I found this amazing recipe from a fellow food blogger, Amy over at House of Nash Eats, and I had to try it out! You start by roasting a whole head of garlic in the oven – I swear if they made candles that smelled like roasted garlic, I’d be such a happy camper. My whole kitchen smelled amazing!
After snagging some fresh rosemary from Madison’s patio, I chopped that finely and added that to the bread dough, letting it proof overnight. It was so cool to watch the bread slowly rise as time went on!
I’m soo happy with the way this turned out!! It tastes amazing and the fresh rosemary and roasted garlic made all the difference. This is also the first time I’ve cooked with my dutch oven (bought it at Lidl, those things sold like hot cakes!), and it was so fun to use.
I would absolutely make this recipe again, but possibly double it next time and maybe cook it for slightly longer. As I took it out of the oven to cool, it deflated almost, so I’ll have to practice with this more to get the hang of it.
So how was your weekend Foodie Friends? Do you have any recipe ideas for our new purée project? Sound out in the comments below to let us know your suggestions of what dishes to make or places we should visit next. As always, feel free to like, comment, & share 🤗
Hello hello, again, Foodie Friends 🙂 Hope you had a great weekend! For this edition of Foodie Adventures, join us for two new takeout restaurant eats, making homemade bread, and two new recipes on the blog!
Hello hello, again, Foodie Friends 🙂 Hope you had a great Easter weekend! For this holiday edition of Foodie Adventures, join us for our Good Friday Fun, Easter Dinner, and Birthday Cake making!
Good Friday Fun
We have a lot of friends and neighbors who have been working tirelessly on the front lines of this virus for the last few months, including doctors, nurses, and grocery store workers.
My mom and I have always been good at sewing (must be in the genes), and spent a lot of my childhood home-making clothing, quilts, baby bibs, and embroidering blankets for our family, friends, and those around us. Every time one of our family members gets married or has a baby, they get a one-of-a-kind quilt made just for them to help commemorate the special occasion.
We knew that putting our sewing skills to work now more than ever would be helpful, as face masks were in short supply and the ones online were so astronomically priced. So we began making and giving them away to whoever needed them! See the slideshow below for some of our fabrics we used and in-action shots.
And these are pictures of the finished products! 100% cotton on the back and Batik fabric on the front, which is one of the tightest, thickly woven fabrics that the CDC reccomends when making homemade masks. The kid sized masks had elastic straps for ease and convenience for both the kiddos and parents and the adult ones had adjustable cloth tie straps.
So far we’ve made about 110 masks since the week before Easter!
Easter Dinner
For Easter this year it was pretty quiet, with only my immediate family, Jamie, and I, making sure to keep our distance and not going near my grandma as much as we could just in case (she’ll be 95 next month!).
Of course we started the day with a special drink, cranberry pineapple mimosas! We took no pictures of those though, but let me tell you, they were delish. 😋🍹
Couldn’t have drinks without some appetizers to tide us over, here was our spread!
A variety of crackers (both regular and GF!), goat cheese, havarti, and some smoked gouda rounded out the plate.
For dinner, or supper rather, since we ate around 1-2 pm, we had both turkey and ham (Grandma’s favorite), along with tons of yummy sides! We made Roasted french onion potatoes, Brussel sprouts with bacon and onions, Balsamic brown sugar glazed carrots, and of course, both Mashed and Sweet potatoes.
We always try to eat at the dining room table during holidays, and this year was no exception! We have these gorgeous hand painted glasses we got from a yard sale a couple years ago and they remind us of spring, so we ended up using those and our pretty blue flowered plates to match.
For dessert, we each got a dark chocolate bunny and ate the last of our three pies from Buttermilk Sky Pie Shop, this one was their seasonal Lemon Icebox flavor, super delish!! I think this one and the Chocolate creme flavors were our two favorites.
Birthday Cake Making!
So if you follow us on Instagram (c’mon, y’all are professionals, I know you have 😏, if not, click the link above 🔼), you would’ve seen us mid-icing these birthday cakes on our story, but here’s a brief overview of what went on!
Jamie’s coworkers are awesome and he’s started a trend of making them each a small cake (the flavors are always surprises) for their special day. The first cake we ever made is below for a March birthday, a Hershey’s chocolate cake with extra chocolate chips, a fresh strawberry compote filling made with local strawberry jam, and a bitter-sweet chocolate buttercream. Needless to say – this cake was a massive hit! 🎂
There were two April birthdays back-to-back this month, so we made two seperate flavors. One was the same Hershey’s chocolate cake from above (which hapened to sink in the middle this go around, I think we opened the oven accidentally too many times 🤦♀️) with the mocha frosting recipe from the right hand picture below as the frosting and filling.
The other was a lemon cake recipe from Alex Guarnaschelli (one of my favorite Food Network Chefs ever), using the lemon frosting from the recipe above, and then the filling from the same Good Housekeeping cookbook below (which made almost a lemon curd-like filling). I’ve had this cookbook since I graduated college, and it’s the same book my mom had to teach her how to cook when she was growing up, and she got me a similar copy as a present. This is the best book to not only find basic recipes in but also teach yourself how to make sauces, work with different cuts of meat, and identify herbs and spices.
With the extra cake filling for both of these, we also made filled cupcakes, which was super fun too! 🧁 This lemon one was absolutely a winner, and while neither of these recipes are non-dairy, I’m working on creating the non-dairy substitutions this week that will be added to the blog! Stay tuned for those!! 🙌😁
So how was your weekend Foodie Friends? What’s been your favorite place to get take-out or carry out over the last week? Was the Easter Bunny good to you this year? Sound out in the comments below to let us know your suggestions of what dishes to make or places we should visit next. As always, feel free to like, comment, & share 🤗
Hello hello, again, Foodie Friends 🙂 Hope you had a fantastic weekend in! We have a shorter edition of Foodie Adventures, with the new review of Wendy’s breakfast menu, Take-out meal adventures, and Homemade meatball making & recipe!
Hello again, Foodie Friends 🙂 For this Foodie Adventure, I’m sharing some of my favorite kid-friendly recipes, fun local cooking kits for kids, and essential skills to help kids learn how to cook in no time!
Hello again, Foodie Friends 🙂 For this Foodie Adventures, my goal is to shine a spotlight on every restaurant I can find offering family style meals, free meals for kids, and take-out/carry-out in the Upstate, SC area to #supportsmallbusinesses!
Hello hello, again, Foodie Friends 🙂 Hope you had a fantastic weekend! We have a shorter edition of Foodie Adventures, with a review of the new Neat Bourbon Bar, making eggplant parm with mom, and a girls brunch out at Stella’s Southern Brassiere!
This week, we’re taking you on our big break in the Big Easy, from exploring the French Quarter, checking out museums, and eating as many classic New Orleans foods as we could! Join us for our NOLA adventure🎉 💜💛💚
