Low-Country Boil & Belated 10 Year Blog Birthday!

The Labour Day long weekend was so, so wonderful!  We had been looking forward to this weekend for a while and had a few fun things planned, starting with a low-country boil.

Since all the ingredients just get thrown into a pot and cook together, there really isn't much for prep work.  We were able to kick back and relax while dinner cooked, and then we enjoyed it outside.

We filled our Dutch oven pot about 3/4 full with water (max.), then added approximately 1 T of cajun spice, 1 T of Old Bay, 3 bay leaves, 1 T peppercorns, 1 T kosher salt, 3 T butter, the juice of 1 lemon, and then we tossed the rest of the lemon in there too, and 1 small onion (all approximate, as we eyeballed it).

After bringing all of that to a boil, we let it simmer and reduce for a few minutes.  Then we added baby potatoes and cooked those for a while.  The corn went in next, then Andouille sausage, and finally the crab legs and shrimp.

Once the shrimp were done we scooped everything out onto some packing paper and dug in.  We had Old Bay on the table, as well as some hot sauce, horseradish, and cocktail sauce, although everything was so flavourful we didn't really need to add any more seasoning.

This was an easy dinner that we will be making again very soon!

After dinner, I slipped inside to ice the cake that I had made after work.  It was a belated-birthday cake to celebrate 10 years of Everyday Foodie, which was actually four weeks ago today (but we were camping then).

I cannot believe I have been blogging for over 10 years, back when it was very strange to take pictures of one's food, and Instagram was years from being created.  I was always so shy about taking pictures of my food in restaurants and tried to sneakily do so while getting funny looks, and usually a blurry photo.

This blog has been a fun, creative outlet for me over the years, and I hope it continues to be so for the years to come.

Friday night was the start of one of the best weekends I've had in a while!  After our crab boil, we sat outside for the rest of the evening and enjoyed the beautiful weather.

How was your long weekend?  

Have you ever done a low-country boil?

A Weekend of Southern Comfort Food

We spent the entire weekend at home, and ate nothing but Southern comfort food.  When we were planning our weekend menu, our wheels would not stop turning.  We ended up making a bunch of delicious dishes we'd never made before, and a some old standbys.  We got started on Friday evening after hitting the grocery store.

First up was chicken-fried steak, with mashed potatoes and red-eye gravy.  We had roasted okra on the side.

This was our first time cooking both chicken-fried steak and okra, and both turned out really well.  Okra is delicious!

On Saturday morning we were up bright and early.  We made buttermilk biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast.

Our friends Jessie and Chris gave us a bunch of tomatoes recently, and we used some of the green ones to make an afternoon snack of fried green tomatoes.

They were tasty dipped in the Cajun sauce that Christopher threw together.

Dinner on Saturday evening was chili with toppings, and some cornbread that we had made earlier in the day.

We froze the leftover chili and half of the cornbread to have for our lunches later this week.

This morning's breakfast was shrimp with cheesy grits.

That hearty breakfast kept us full for the whole day.  This evening we made big dinner so we'd have a meal for tonight and lunches for Monday/ Tuesday.  We had fried chicken, mac and cheese, baked beans, bacon-bourbon coleslaw, and cornbread.

#mealprepsunday Hahaha!

And if that wasn't enough food and cooking for one weekend, we also made bananas foster for dessert.

Believe it or not, we didn't just get fat cook and eat all weekend.  We also managed to sneak in three or four movies, hours of reading, and a whole lot of relaxing. 

How was your weekend?  What did you do?  

Did you have any comfort food this weekend?