What I Ate In Florida

I have an exciting recent eats post for you today. It features what I ate in Florida during our Memorial Day weekend visit. The reason for my excitement is that it’s the first time I’ve eaten my dad’s dinners in almost a year! He was so awesome to cook for us four out of the five nights we were there. And on the fifth night, we ate delicious leftovers! 🙂

I’ll show you a few breakfast and lunch photos first and then get straight into these yummy dinners.

BREAKFAST + LUNCH

FAGE strawberry Greek yogurt cup with my dad’s homemade granola, blueberries, bananas, raspberries and peanut butter.

Cottage cheese scrambled eggs and watermelon. This was my first watermelon of the season and was it ever tasty and refreshing!

I ate this lunch every single day of our visit. Turkey sandwich with mayo, mustard, gouda cheese, avocado and sweet pickles. Finn and I also put a dent in a family-size box of Cheez-Its.

DINNER

Dinner on the first night was quiche lorraine and a salad. Quiche is one of my favorite foods of all time and my dad makes a great one with a homemade crust. I need to sit with my dad and get a pie crust lesson because it is one of my biggest cooking weaknesses!

The second evening my dad spoiled us with a prime rib + popover dinner. This is usually a holiday meal for us and he wasn’t planning on cooking it but saw a rib roast on sale at the grocery and made a spur-of-the-moment decision to grill one. I am not complaining one bit. This was a great dinner. And my dad’s popovers are heavenly. I ate two of them slathered in salted butter and Finn liked them too!

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better than the prime rib dinner, my dad outdid himself with this feast. Grilled cornish hens with gribiche sauce, peas and sautéed mushrooms and the creamiest mashed potatoes.

Gribiche sauce is a cold egg sauce in French cuisine. It’s made by emulsifying hard-boiled egg yolks, mustard and vinegar with neutral oil. It also includes finely chopped hard-boiled eggs. My dad finishes his gribiche sauce with capers and herbs. Some people also include cornichons.

True story…I used to have a STRONG aversion to capers. They were one of the only foods I absolutely couldn’t stand to eat so for most of my childhood and early adulthood, I missed out on the magic that is gribiche sauce. Somewhere along the way, I turned a corner with capers and I could now literally drink this sauce because it’s that good. I kept spooning more and more of it onto my cornish hen.

You can serve this sauce over fish, chicken or grilled, roasted or sautéed spring veggies like asparagus. I’ll get my dad’s recipe and share it here soon!

Oh, and my dad says the secret to the best mashed potatoes is to add cream cheese AND sour cream to them. I’m here to co-sign whatever he says because they were amazing.

Night four was my dad’s INCREDIBLE homemade pizza! He makes everything from scratch – dough and sauce – and it is the best. He left half of one pizza plain cheese for Finn and I swear he ate almost the entire half of the pizza. He kept asking for more.

I ate my pizza with a chopped salad kit on the side.

And on leftover night, I had the cornish hen meal again.

ETC

I didn’t take any photos of the desserts that I ate but I polished off a pint of Jeni’s Gooey Butter Cake ice cream during my visit. My dad also made a homemade pound cake that DEFINITELY had a pound of butter in it. It was decadent!

QUESTIONS

Do you like quiche? What are your favorite ingredient combinations? 

Do you put salt on your watermelon? My grandmother does and she says it makes it sweeter???

Have you ever tried gribiche sauce?

Any recipe requests from what you see here?