Heather Bakes

My mom loves nothing more than to seek out estate sales. She scours the newspaper every Thursday for ads and then hits up each and every estate sale in the DFW area. She does find some cool stuff, but to be honest- these sales usually creep me the hell out. Unlike with yard/garage sales, estate sales usually involve the prior occupant either dying or heading to a nursing home, and it’s just kind of depressing to see their very personal (underwear?? hello!) items put up for $1.50. Today Gina suckered me into heading to one such sale right in my very neighborhood. This particular resident actually had a bunch of really cool cooking stuff, including some vintage cookbooks. The one I picked up? Meta Given’s Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking.

This should be a lesson to all of you future authors out there: NEVER include “modern” in the title of anything, because one day it will not be modern at all. It will be kitsch. But I love this cookbook. It has a ton of dishes, and there are even little handwritten notes in the margins and scraps of handed-down recipes stuck inside. It’s also interesting to see how cooking has changed. For example, in the “Drop Cookie” section, there is a recipe for something called “ROCKS, No. 2” that includes rendered poultry fat, cinnamon, brown sugar, walnuts and raisins. I wonder why we never made that in class?

Dallas is definitely not a walking city, so Brian and I were really excited when a new seafood restaurant opened just right down the street from us. We decided to give Offshore’s Next Door a shot tonight. It’s a teeny, tiny little place with maybe 12 tables inside. But the best part? They have a FULL BAR… and they’re open ’til midnight. The food did not disappoint. I’m not a big fried fish fan, so I had the chopped salad and added lump crab on top:

The salad contained not a shred of iceberg (woohoo!) and was filled with tomatoes, red and green peppers, hearts of palm (LOVELOVELOVE them), and lots of shredded lump crab meat. I made Brian stash a container of Annie’s Goddess Dressing from home in his cargo shorts, and that was a perfect topping.

I’m a little obsessed with this salad dressing… Old Dressing Pockets (Bri) was not amused.

They also had a great new beer: Leinie’s Sunset Wheat. Brian ordered it and I stole some sips. Very summery!

So yeah, we’ll definitely be going back. The walk there and back plus dinner made for a nice little weeknight date. Any Dallas readers- you should give it a shot!

Running Update: Easy 4 miles today. Tomorrow’s my rest day, but I’ll probably swim or something. Also, if anyone’s interested, you can check out my Nike+ running log here. I kind of want to switch to a Garmin (any reviews?) but for now this works.