However, I did want to share one meal that Bret and I cooked while we were up in Ogunquit. Since it was a family vacation, we found ourselves eating out a lot. Since everyone wanted a few nights to just take it easy at home, each couple (Bret's parents, his sister and brother-in-law, and us) volunteered to cook one meal. Since Bret and I don't have a grill and thus don't grill often, we wanted to cook something that we could use the beach house's grill with. After our trip to Stonewall Kitchen, Bret and I hit up York's Hannaford and the Meat House (which I still haven't visited locally) and found the ingredients for our family dinner.
Despite it being a really hot evening, we turned on the oven and the grill. We were pretty happy with our little family feast.
First up, we beer-poached three different kinds of sausages that we picked up from the Meat House - sweet Italian, spicy Italian and chicken sun-dried tomato. Once the sausages were cooked through, we threw them on the grill to get nice and crispy outside.
I grilled some red, yellow and green peppers, along with some cubanelle peppers and onions. Once the vegetables had some nice grill marks, I sliced them up, threw them in the pan used to poach the sausages and sauteed it in the beer and sausage juices. I really think that grilling vegetables brings out a deeper flavor in vegetables.
Our sausage, peppers and onions were served with fresh crusty sausage rolls from Hannaford. We had a regular yellow mustard, along with Stonewall Kitchen's roasted garlic mustard.
We served two sides with the sausages. The first was a salad using the ingredients that Bret's sister brought up from her CSA share. We used her lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber. We also topped the salad with sliced almonds and a chopped apple from our own farmers' market delivery. Bret's mom brought a light Italian and a light Caesar dressing but Bret and I also couldn't resist purchasing Stonewall Kitchen's maple balsamic dressing - yum!
We also braved the old-fashioned oven and attempted to make sweet potato fries. These actually came out pretty good except that some of the fries were a bit more charred than others.
We had many, many beers with and after dinner. Nothing goes better with sausages than beer, right? It wasn't the most extravagant meal but it had a lot of nice flavors and I was happy when everyone took a second helping!
Just when Bret's family thought that dinner was over, they were surprised when we also brought out dessert. I baked chocolate chip cookies in the afternoon and after they were fully cooled, I added vanilla ice cream, wrapped them up and threw them in the freezer. Ice cream sandwiches on a hot summer evening makes everyone happy, especially Bret's nephew!
I'm hoping to get back to my regular blog posts as I get back into the swing of things so bear with me! I don't know why but it really has been hard for me to sit down and write after so many days of really unplugging myself at the beach.
What do you do to find your creative inspiration?
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