Eat Your Books and Mango Celebrations

E. brought a few mangoes home last week. I was dismayed. He purchased four. I wasn't sure what to do with them. I sliced into one and was absolutely floored by how perfectly ripe it was.

Last week I saw people talking about Champagne Mangoes on Twitter in celebration and revelry. This week when I went shopping I bought a case of this heavenly fruit. I had a mango eating party in my office with a colleague who had never had a fresh mango and celebrated. We burst into fits of laughter. They are super fun to eat. Here is how.

There is a fibrous core in the lower middle section of a mango. Slice down one side of the mango, not directly center so you miss this tough section.

Did you know that the mango inspired the paisley design?

Take a sharp knife and slice lines carefully to the skin side of the mango without cutting through the skins.

Turn and cut across making a grid.

Cut down the other side and repeat.

Use your hand and push up the little cubes of golden goodness from the skin side so it looks like these photos. Bite off each cube and giggle.

What do you do with a case of mangoes? Good question. I was just having a conversation about a new site called Eat Your Books last week with my former colleague Camilla at Restaurant Nora. Some of you know I have a great love for cookbooks and a little collection. This website allows you to register the cookbooks you own for a small monthly fee. You can log five books for free. I recently posted that I'm a huge Ina Garten fan. My issue is I can't remember what book I found the chicken chili recipe in and end up pulling out all of Ina's books having to dig through the indexes. This site is a life saver. You enter "chicken chili" and it tells you it is from Barefoot Contessa Parties! I was so excited that I Tweeted about @EatYourBooks.

Baltiville Nelle Somerville 

Calling all cookbook collectors, just found Eat Your Bookshttp://bit.ly/hbUrAl You can log in all of your books and search recipes.

23 Mar 

This Tweet was then reTweeted (RT) by a few people. I received a very nice email from the co-creator of Eat Your Books, Jane, thanking me for my Tweet. She offered me a lifetime membership to the site as a thank you! I was so tickled and suggested it would be a great gift for one of my lucky readers. She agreed. So one of you will also get a lifetime membership to Eat Your Books! This is why I'm such a fan of Twitter. You can really connect with the products and people you adore.

So what do you do with a case of mangoes? I have registerd 55 of my cookbooks so far with Eat Your Books. When I entered "mango" 75 recipes popped up. The recipes weren't listed, but the ingredients were. So looking at a few recipes names, and gathering those books I came up with this simple recipe on my own, Mango and Avacado Salad.  I will also try to make Ina's Mango Salsa, Martha's Mango sauce, Ruth's Mango fool and on and on it goes.

This mango salad was just a combination of mango, lime juice and avocado mixed together with black pepper on a bed of lettuce. Flip your mango cubes out and then slice them as close to the skin as possible. Squeeze half a lime, add an avocado (cut the same way), mix and yum.

Add the mixture on to a bed of lettuce and you have a pretty healthy salad.

In honor of my new found favorite site and seeing Nora last week as a special bonus I'd like to also give away a signed copy of Nora's cousin Sylvia Main's new cookbook called Fabulous Fairholme.

The book features Breakfasts and Brunches and the photography and recipes are beautiful, yet simple.

These egg blossoms look delicious even though my husband (Charlie, E., E-Boogie) doesn't like a runny egg yoke.

To enter the first ever Stone Hill Farm giveaway please do the following:

1. Follow this blog 

2. Please suggest a (Follow Friday) #FF for @EatYourBooks on Twitter

3. Follow me and E. on Twitter @Baltiville @MrBaltiville

4. Post a comment on this blog telling me how you entered and I will randomly select a winner.

The lucky winner will get a Lifetime Membership to Eat Your Books and a copy of Fabulous Fairholme. The winner must be a U.S. resident to win. Please enter by Saturday, April 8, 2011 and I'll announce the winner shortly after.

Thank you again to Jane at Eat Your Books for my lifetime membership and the extra membership for one of my lucky readers. Now I'm off to juice some mangoes.

Dupont Circle

One of my favorite blocks in Washington, DC is the cross section of 21st Street to R. Street in Dupont Circle. I spent a semester in college at American University for the Museum Studies in the Arts program the fall of 1992. Some called it the Washington siesta. Maybe for the Political Science or Journalists students...but the art program was intense. Dr. Kendall Taylor was fantastic and I've never worked harder or learned more in six months. She wanted to prove to the rest of the school that art was serious. We spent Monday through Wednesday visiting with curators, conservators, preservationists and exhibit designers at nearly every museum and historic home in DC. We had to interview for an internship that occupied the rest of the week. It was competitive and I won the coveted Membership and Development internship at The Phillips Collection, located in this pocket of elegance in the heart of Embassy Row. 

It was the first Modern Art Museum in the United States. The original home was opened to the public in 1921 to showcase the Phillips' family's incredible collection and most impressive Luncheon of the Boating Party by Renoir. The Phillips family opened a few rooms to the public and even allowed the family cats to roam the galleries. They are celebrating their 90th year this year.

Source

I would spend my lunch breaks listening to the docents talk about this painting, visit the Van Gogh's and meditate in the Rothko room. As part of the internship I had to interview the entire staff as my final project. I'll never forget interviewing Charlie Moffett, the director. I was a clueless twenty year old. He suggested I ask one question at a time! Ha! I was so nervous and he was so kind and taught me so much in that moment. Just slow down, listen and one answer will lead to more questions. It was incredible and I'll never forget my experiences at The Phillips. So many of the staff are still there from when I was an intern in 1992. I ran into chief conservator Elizabeth Steele last week on R. Street when I was in town.

I loved my Washington semester so much that I moved there two weeks after college graduation in 1994. A few years later I landed back in the Dupont Circle neighborhood as the Director of Special Events at Restaurant Nora. This past week was the first time I've been back to the restaurant since 2001. I enjoyed walking down memory lane literally from 21st to R. Street.

Nora's is on the corner of Florida and R. Streets on the edge of Dupont Circle. The building used to house a grocery store for Embassy Row. It is the first cerified organic restaurant in the United States. Nora is Austrian and has a simple aproach to cooking that she learned as a child. She helped establish and build up the Dupont Circle farmers market. I met her first in 1995 when I was planning events for a company called WashingtonInc and through my involvement in the Women Chef's and Restauranteurs organization.

The cherry blossoms were popping out beautifully in DC.

Nora's herb garden is such a treat outside the restaurant. They have done some recent landscaping and the pansies were a nice burst of color.

This spire was acquired from a church in Brooklyn, NY.

This cherry blossom will be incredible in another week.

Walking through the restaurant and seeing the signage brought back so many memories.

Nora's has a museum quality collection of quilts. This one is a children's crib quilt on the way up to the Gallery Room.

I stopped in downstairs and saw that Carlos was still behind the bar. I was sad to miss Jack. He was on vacation.

I lucked out and got to visit with Nora herself in the restaurant. I also got to see a few other pals, Camilla, Thomas and Steven who I worked with ten years ago. The pastry team was still the same and I even got to see my excutive chef Yuriko during my time. It was really wonderful. The space looked so fresh and new to me.

Click to purchase Nora's cookbook.

I had my favorite Caesar Salad. The hard boiled eggs are always cooked to perfection, the dressing is fishy and garlicky like a good Caesar should be.

I also had the most incredible Halibut nestled on a bed of Kale with a black bean ragut.

I've had to put refined sugar on a serious break lately. This fruit plate was so delicious. There were grapefruit, apples, pears and bananas. 

The executive chef Todd Woods let me visit the kitchen in the middle of service. The day I was in town Nora was on NPR. Click here to read and listen to Nora and Todd talk about winter greens.

I got a quick peak at the National Cherry Blossoms on my way home. This is one of the biggest parts I miss about living in Baltimore now. I was thrilled to cut through the city to catch a glimpse of these magestic trees. They were given as a gift from Japan. Oh poor Japan. You just can't catch a break. Please donate here if you haven't already.

I shot this one out of the sunroof!

Thankfully a red light let me capture a closer look. 

I bought my condo in Dupont Circle when I was working at Restaurant Nora. I bought it so I could walk to work. It was like coming full circle from my college days back to Dupont. I loved working there and walking the beautiful streets. The city, it's art and it's blossoms still pull at my heartstrings. 

Thank you Ripon College for offering the Washington Sememster at American University. Thank you Phillips Collection for those amazing five months of learning. Thank you Nora, Steven, Thomas, Camilla and all the staff at Nora's and Asia Nora. I learned so much from you all and your passion for organic and sustainable living. And thank you DC for being just a few 33 miles down the road. 

Holy Tomatoes

As summer is drawing closer to an end I finally broke down and bought some tomatoes at the Waverly Farmers Market. Mind you, I didn't want to have to buy them but our Stone Hill tomatoes didn't fare so well in the heat. Joan from One Straw Farm is the best source for ideas of what to cook from the market and her produce is organic, well cared for, fresh as the day is long and hands down amazing. You can taste her smile and passion in every bite. I end up speaking to her about recipes every week and told her I was looking for a great sauce tomato. She said she had a story for me.

She walked me to these Heirloom Roma Tomatoes. She had an employee, Tony, who was from Italy who was never impressed with the Roma's he tasted in the U.S. He went back to Italy and brought the seeds back for Joan to start growing these babies. He was so protective of them that he would slap the hands of any who squeezed or handled them unjustly. She fondly named them Tony Tomatoes.

I bought a case from her for a steep discount.

And this helpful young fella helped me to my car blocks away from the market.

One wee little cherry from Stone Hill. Not enough for sauce making.

Slice the Tony's, drizzle olive oil and this salt and fresh cracked pepper.

Roast for 2 hours at 300 degrees.

I probably could have upped the heat but the result was great. You want that roasted, caramelized char.

I grabbed a massive handful of fresh basil.

Chop and add after you puree the cooked tomatoes.

Use a hand blender and pulse to puree.

Add 2 tablespoons of sugar to cut the acid. Add more salt if you like, but I prefer to keep my canning jars free of salt, knowing I can add it later.

The second batch I made had about seven cloves of roasted garlic and I added a fourth of a cup of dried oregano. These jars with these fridge lids are for us to use this week. They are great for the ones you will use quickly. I found them at Walmart. I feel like a little grasshopper stocking up for winter. After fours hours I only had six large jars canned. I most certainly over purchased so became a tomato fairy to my Stone Hill neighbors. One neighbor traded us the tomatoes for a great fancy schmancy brew for E's birthday. It was a long week of good, hot, hard work and tons of hours with great rewards.

I'm so thankful to live in this country and have access to such great, fresh produce so readily available. I learned so much about organic farming, the importance of shopping at farmers markets, and certification when I was working for Restaurant and Asia Nora. Nora worked countless hours to become the first certified organic restaurant in the country. I can without question tell you that One Straw Farm is successful because of Nora and other restaurants that value local, organic produce. Thank you Nora for all of your pioneering efforts to keep small farms viable in this country.