Cottage Food on the 4th of July

Posted on 10 July 2007 under Eat This Blog, Ingredients, Kitchen Gear, Shopping

I admit it: Mary and I weren’t on American soil on the 4th of July. Well, yes, we were in the morning, but by noon last Wednesday we were in Canada. Not just any Canada either. The Canadian First Nation unceded reservation of Walpole Island, located in the northern part of Lake St. Clair. We love it there! Mary’s brother owns a cottage right there on the St. Clair River (leasing the land from the First Nation people). There’s no phone, no internet connection of any kind, and only halfway-decent TV reception. Just Mary, the dog, and myself.

Before taking the ferry over, we stopped at a Kroger in New Baltimore, Michigan, for groceries for those next few days. Back in the meat case, we found these beautiful “gourmet” Angus burgers:

 

The burgers on the right contain bacon and Colby-Jack cheese, along with some spices. The ones on the left are called “Black & Bleu”, containing coarse-ground black peppercorn and big junks of bleu cheese. I cooked these up for 4th of July lunch on David’s tiny apartment-style stove and served them on onion buns. Without any other toppings whatsoever, these were absolutely tasty! They weighed in at almost a half-pound each uncooked, and Mary never did get the chance to finish hers. (No, I didn’t eat it …)

Here’s the tiny kitchen in David’s cottage:

Another item I found at that Kroger was Romano’s Marinara Pasta Sauce.

I probably wouldn’t have picked up this particular jar of sauce if I hadn’t spotted the manufacturer’s address on the side of the label. That it was made in Shelby Township, Michigan, made me more than a little curious. Mary thought it would make a great meal to grab some linguini and some shrimp to make up a couple plates of shrimp marinara with the Romano’s sauce. I went ahead and had the guy get me a pound of steamed-and-shelled cocktail shrimp while Mary headed off to find the linguini and a few other things we needed for the cottage. We knew the final dish would at least be interesting! That evening, for our 4th of July dinner, I cooked off the pasta while heating the sauce over low heat. When they were both about done, I sautéed about half of the shrimp in some vegetable oil, black pepper and garlic powder.

If you look at this picture you can see the sauce ended up being just a bit watery, draining a thin layer under the noodles. But the flavor of the sauce was quite good! We’ll have this sauce again when we can get it. I’ll have to add a few sprinkles of cornstarch to it though. Or, better yet, maybe some sausage …

To make you jealous, here’s a picture of a cargo ship in the St. Clair River. To take this picture, I knelt on the sofa in the cottage’s living room, opened the window, moved the screen out of the way, and shot this image. Oh, yeah, baby, what a life!

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