This week's PhotoHunt theme is "Pink."
I had so many photos that would work for this theme but ended up going with flowers in various shades of pink, a color I love!
You can find more Photo Hunters and join the hunt here.
Thanks for visiting and have a happy weekend. Happy Independence Day to those of you here in the good ole USA.
Here's a case where a bridge was named for a street shrine. The bridge, called Ponte dei Carmini, was built in 1791 and named for the adjacent shrine with an image of the Madonna del Carmine inside. The shrine is lovely but needs some attention; one side is propped up with what looks like a bed slat. This is in Castello, close to the church of San Zaccaria.
What a great recipe! This week's salad came from Marcia of Happy Trails For Us; she found it in Bon Appetit magazine.
I love pesto but tarragon pesto was a new experience for me. It's delicious and so easy to make. I had some leftover pesto that I used on pasta later in the week; that was tasty too.
I didn't tweak this recipe much; I substituted sugar snap peas from my garden for the cukes and skipped the grilled bread. It's a beautiful salad.
Thanks Marcia, this was a winner. And by the way, Marcia's been blogging from an Alaskan cruise; check out her blog for some great posts and cool photos.
The recipe is below. Links to other Sunday Salad Sampler participants can be found here. Next up is Nancy's Watermelon Salad.
Happy Sunday and have a great week!
Continue reading "Sunday Salads: Grilled Chicken Salad with Tarragon Pesto" »
This week's PhotoHunt theme is "Flags."
Various and sundry flags seen at Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival. The first photo shows Buddhist prayer flags in a tree.
You can find more Photo Hunters and join the hunt here.
Thanks for visiting and have a happy weekend.
Tucked away on a little calle in Castello north of Via Garibaldi, this lovely 14th century Gothic relief shows the Virgin and Child with saints Peter and Paul. The child is handing a key to Peter and a scroll to Paul.
The relief is over an entrance to a former religious complex that once included a hospice(Ospizio dei Santi Pietro e Paolo) for pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land, a convent, and an oratory dedicated to San Gioachino, father of the Virgin Mary. The hospice was founded in the 11th c. and was later converted to a hospital which was one of the largest in Venice. The complex was closed by the French in the early 19th century; now it's city property and I've never found it open and don't know what (if anything) it's used for today.
I didn’t participate in Slow Scoopers last summer but they inspired me to buy an ice cream maker which has been in winter storage but is now out and cranking! This amazing sorbet is the first thing I’ve made this year and also, this was my first ever experience of foraging in the wild for ingredients. :)
There are a few things I’ve eaten in my life that were so good they almost made me swoon and this sorbet is one of them. It’s a cult classic dessert here in North Carolina and every spring, people flock to my favorite local restaurant, Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, to eat this stuff. Bill Smith (the chef at Crooks’ and a 2009 James Beard finalist for best regional chef) created this recipe after doing research into medieval Arabic and Sicilian recipes for flower ices.
Pretty much every Southern kid learns how to pluck a honeysuckle blossom, pull the stamen out, and then eat the tiny drop of honey inside the flower. Well, this sorbet tastes like a combination of that honey droplet and the aroma of honeysuckle when it’s in bloom.
This week's recipe came from Cindy Ruth of Baked Alaska. The actual recipe she gave us was for "Grilled Romaine Salad with Citrus Caesar Vinaigrette" but I ended up switching the main ingredient.
It's gotten hot here in NC - hot enough to make the lettuce plants in my garden bolt, and I used the last of my romaine for last week's shrimp salad. The only lettuce at the Farmer's Market was loose leaf lettuce, not suitable for grilling, but when I saw this beautiful radicchio, I knew it would work perfectly for this recipe.
I fell in love with grilled radicchio in Venice. Lots of places serve it there and in fact, the first place radicchio was cultivated was in the Veneto region of Italy during the Renaissance. Most of the radicchio in US grocery stores is the round kind that looks like a small purple cabbage (Radicchio di Choggia) but most restaurants in Venice serve the elongated variety (Radicchio di Treviso).
The radicchio I found at my market was the same shape as the Treviso variety but was only purple on the ends. I'm not sure but it might have been harvested young before it had time to turn completely purple. Anyway, it was wonderful grilled for this salad.
I love the citrus vinaigrette recipe too. I cut the oil back to a little under half a cup and instead of croutons, I put a few pine nuts on top. The sweet little Sungold tomatoes were the first to ripen in my garden; tomato season is finally here, yay!
Thanks Cindy Ruth for an excellent recipe.
Cindy Ruth's recipe is below. Links to other Sunday Salad Sampler participants can be found here. Next up is Marcia's Grilled Chicken Salad with Tarragon Pesto.
This week's PhotoHunt theme is "Creamy."
A couple of photos I took in Venice last year. First up is a booth at the Christmas market in campo Santo Stefano. I took this photo because of the marzipan fruit but there are some cream horns behind them.
A cream-colored statue of the Madonna inside a little street shrine.
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Thanks for visiting and Happy Summer Solstice!
Sometimes the wall behind the shrine is just as interesting as the shrine itself. This wall is ravaged but beautiful.
Here's another example ~
Maria I asked a question in the comments of my post about Madonna dell' Arsenale ~
"I was just reading Doctored Evidence and Brunetti was commenting on the lions at the Arsenale, wondering whether the men who carved them ever saw a real one. Are the lions ‘funny’ looking? "
The answer is yes!, There are four lions outside the entrance to the Arsenale, and one of them in particular is pretty goofy looking. The entrance is guarded by eight statues of pagan gods with the lions lounging beside them.
This is the goofy one - such a worried expression on his face! I love him. He looks straight out of cartoons. Despite his Disney appearance, he's the oldest of the bunch, a Greek sculpture dating back to the 6th century BC. The Venetians stole him from island of Delos.
This one sits to the left of the cartoon lion.
And this one sits alone is to the left of the entrance. He came from the port of Piraeus in Athens where he might have been part of a fountain,and there's carved graffiti on him: runic inscriptions left by Scandinavian soldiers who were fighting in Greece in the 11th century. Supposedly translators have concluded that the graffiti is an archaic equivalent of "Kilroy Was Here."
A collection of "garden wall" Madonnas from all over Venice. I love this iconic image and all its many variations. I'm partial to the "squirmy baby wearing a crown" in the first photo and love those metal umbrellas over most of them.
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