Living a Lie

Since last we posted (almost 3 months ago…), we’ve gotten married, Talley got a PhD, we’ve moved off the houseboat and across the state and I’ve started vet school. The name Houseboat Eats is now fraudulent, but we’re going to keep it anyway, for old time’s sake.

Our first order of business now that things have stabilized a bit is to post wedding recipes. It’ll take a little while to get everything up, but it’ll probably all go up eventually. The most requested recipes after the wedding (actually, the only requested recipes) were the sangria recipes, so we’ll start there. A white sangria and a red. Then, in no particular order, we’ll post the recipes for our:

• chicken liver pate
• asparagus pickles
• lavender ginger soda and the rosemary lemon soda
• farro/lentil/squash salad
• pork tinga
• jicama salad

My aunts Margaret and Becky and our friend Kate made no fewer than 18 fruit pies for the event, and we’ll try to get some of those up too.

The wedding took place on a small island up in the San Juans (up by Canada) that had almost no electricity, refrigeration, or any of the other amenities that we have come to depend on in our kitchen. But we did have a gas stove, a fire pit, and a lot of coolers. Theoretically, Talley and I were going to make all of the food for the wedding (Talley and I and a crew of 8 family members, to be fair), but when it came down to the day of the feast, we were overwhelmed, despite all of our planning and prep work. The morning of the wedding, our friends and family stepped up and spent all morning helping – they cleaned, chopped, and baked 15 delicata squash, they peeled and shoestringed 20 pounds of green apples and jicama, they sliced 25 avocados, cut 15 pounds of cheese… the list goes on — all of this without the benefit of electricity or decent knives (well, most did it without good knives – the apparently psychic jicama salad group actually brought their own sharp knives…).

So, none of the wedding recipes are very fussy or fancy because they had to either be made ahead of time and transported or be easy enough that they would come together the morning of, but they’re all really pretty good, particularly the tinga if you ask me, and we are certainly sentimentally attached to them all now.

Lastly, we just want to say thanks again to everyone who made the occasion so perfect and so memorable.

Stay tuned for the first recipe: White sangria with apples, citrus fruit and pisco. Make it and be happy!

Tagged as: move, PhD, wedding