Hey All –

I hope you are all having a superb weekend so far.  It is going by pretty quickly  –  but that is a sign of an enjoyable weekend, I guess.

Yesterday my friend Katherine came down to Rhode Island and she, mom and I went to see Julie & Julia. I had been waiting for this movie to come out for about a year.  I loved the fact that there is a movie about a food blogger and Julia Child – one of my favorite chefs.  I really enjoyed reading the book by Julie Powell and I had been looking forward to the movie for such a long time, it did not disappoint.  One day I am going to own Mastering the Art of French Cooking, I promise!  One of my friends told me not to go to the movie hungry – and I would pass that advice along to anyone who is going to see the film 🙂  We snacked on popcorn during the movie – and we got through all of the wonderful looking food because we knew we had a fun dinner to come home to.

In honor of Julia, Katherine and I thought that we would make omelets for dinner – perhaps one of Julia’s favorite meals, and definitely one of her specialties.  I definitely had a Julia moment in the kitchen – and our omelets turned into scrambled eggs with scallions and green peppers – but guess what? They were still delicious.  As Ms. Child used to say, “no excuses.”

I think that one of the reasons our eggs turned out tasting so fantastic was that I did actually use butter in our omelet pan instead of  cooking spray, Earth balance or some other substitute.  Nothing compares to just cooking in butter 🙂  Here is what the eggs ended up looking like:

The eggs tasted so good! But I must say I will definitely be trying omelets again this week – I must master the skill now that I’ve watched an entire episode of Julia Child’s cooking show on omelets.

Before we sat down to “omelets” we had a first course of gazpacho which was out of this world! It was almost spice, and full of flavor. I love anything where you can actually see pieces of garlic floating around.  I just love this chilled soup! It was wonderful and it is the perfect dish in the summer, with a couple of pieces of French bread on the side.

Gazpacho is actually pretty simple to make – but we were lucky enough to find some at the Farmer’s Market this morning, so I saved a lot of time in the kitchen – lucky me!

Because I was making the eggs, I did not have a lot of time to enjoy the first course… first I sautéed our vegetables that were going to be the “filling” in the omelet, scallions and green peppers and they were cooked in a little bit of butter 🙂 I removed the scallions and peppers and cooked the eggs, adding a the veggies and 1/4 cup of sharp cheddar cheese when the eggs were about half cooked.  The scramble turned out to be great – but I still have to work on my omelet technique.  That will be something I do this week, hopefully!

In an interesting turn of events, I decided to add the rest of my gespacho to my eggs – what a great combination (although really ugly – thus no photo was taken).

I had bought a raspberry “bar” from Seven Starts for dessert – but because we did not have dinner until about 10 o’clock we definitely did not need anything after the eggs.  It was a “sort of” French meal on many levels – including the time that we sat down to dinner.

Breakfast:

This morning I decided to make pancakes.  I put dark chocolate pieces into the batter for each individual pancake – about four or five chips for each cake.  Once they were cooked I topped the pancakes with a touch of Earth Balance, fresh blueberries from the farmer’s market and about two tablespoons of syrup. It was a great breakfast!

OK – I’m off to enjoy Sunday. I’ll see you all tonight after I finish dinner..!