ROMANCE MEETS OUTDOOR DINING

 It is my absolute delight to welcome author Sloane Taylor to my blog today. A master in the kitchen and on the written page, this self-proclaimed romantic reminds us of just how easy it is to create amorous settings with our special someone on the patio or deck surrounded by gardens that are at their peak. She even includes a menu of the perfect meal for the occasion, as well as the link to her latest cookbook. I invite you to stop by and say hello to Sloane. –Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist  

 

ROMANCE MEETS OUTDOOR DINING

 

From Sloane Taylor, Award-winning Romance and Cookbook Author

 

Spring is an amazing time of year and my favorite because that’s when the Earth comes alive. All sorts of beautiful things happen. Trees are budding, tender plants push through the ground, romance is in the air and warm weather is just a few weeks away.

 

I am a romantic through and through. Always have been and with any luck I always will be. Romance is much more than a quick trip to tangle the sheets. It is about being with someone you love and doing little things to show them how much they mean to you. In my case I cook because I love it.  

 

When summer arrives and the gardens are ablaze in color, I want to move the romance outside. So why not share a summer night with your someone special? What better way than with a sizzling romantic dinner, candles, wine, and music. You don’t need much to set the mood and turn your patio, balcony, or kitchen into a lover’s nook. Make your night special with great food because it is the doorway to infinite possibilities.

 

A printed flat sheet is perfect for a festive tablecloth or set out placemats for the plates and serving dishes. Use plenty of candles in different sizes and a variety of holders scattered around the table to enhance the mood, but definitely avoid scented candles. Stemmed wine glasses sparkle in candlelight and add a festive feel to your dinner. Use your regular dishes or, for fun, mix it up with a number of different plates that don’t match but compliment each other for the different courses. Experiment and have fun.  

 

Now that you have the perfect location and setting for you and that right person, may I suggest you spoil yourself with an intimate dinner meant for lovers. It is easy to prepare and leftovers make marvelous sandwiches. This recipe also works great in the oven.

 

Ask your butcher to dress the tenderloin. If he won’t, then you need to remove the excess fat and sliver out the silver strip along the side. Easy to do. Slide a sharp knife under the strip close to one end. Use a back and forward motion like sawing to ease your knife between the meat and the strip as you lift it away from the beef.

 

MENU

Marinated & Grilled Beef Tenderloin

Potatoes Baked on the Grill

Grilled Asparagus

Sautéed Mushrooms

Dry Red Wine – Valpolicella.

 

Marinated & Grilled Beef Tenderloin

2 – 3 lb. (1 – 1.5kg) beef tenderloin

½ cup (120ml) olive oil

½ cup (120ml) dry red wine

3 rosemary sprigs or 1½ tsp. (7.5ml) dried

6 thyme sprigs or 1 tsp. (5ml) dried

1 bay leaf

3 garlic cloves, chopped fine

Freshly ground pepper to taste

Oil to coat grill grate

 

Combine all ingredients in a long bowl or plastic bag and a shallow pan. Marinade in fridge 2 – 20 hours. Seems like a strange time span, but the longer the marinade the tastier the beef.

 

Remove meat from refrigerator 1 hour before grilling or roasting in oven. Meat needs to be almost room temperature.

 

Grill Instructions

Preheat grill to medium-high.

 

Pat tenderloin dry. Discard marinade. Add beef, close lid, and grill 15 – 20 minutes or until meat is done to your preference. Be sure to turn meat several times to avoid burning.

 

Oven Instructions

Preheat oven to 400° F (200°C).

 

Line a roasting pan with aluminum foil. Pat tenderloin dry. Discard marinade. Add beef to pan. Roast 30 – 40 minutes or until meat is done to your preference. Save the juice to moisten he meat when you serve.

 

May you enjoy all the days of your life filled with good friends, laughter, and seated around a well-laden table!

 

Sloane

 

Sloane Taylor is an Award-Winning Romance Author with a passion that consumes her day and night. She is an avid cook and posts new recipes on her blog http://sloanetaylor.blogspot.com/ every Wednesday.  The recipes are user friendly, meaning easy. 

 

Learn more about Taylor's cookbooks Date Night Dinners Date Night Dinners - Meals to Make Together for a Romantic Evening: Cookbook for Two: Taylor, Sloane: 9781732363526: Amazon.com: Books, Date Night Dinners Sizzling Summer Date Night Dinners Sizzling Summer (Meals to Make Together): Taylor, Sloane: 9781732363588: Amazon.com: Books, and Recipes to Create Holidays Extraordinaire Recipes to Create Holidays Extraordinaire: Taylor, Sloane: 9781732363564: Amazon.com: Books on Amazon.

 

Excerpts from her romance books and free reads can be found on her website http://www.sloanetaylor.com/ website, blog http://sloanetaylor.blogspot.com/, and her Amazon Author Page https://www.amazon.com/author/sloanetaylor. Connect with Taylor on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/AuthorSloaneTaylor/ and Twitter https://twitter.com/sloanetaylor2

A Garden: Nature’s Springtime Wardrobe of Many Colors

 

 From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

 

Surveys reveal consistently that by a wide margin, green and blue are the favorite colors of all of humanity across the globe—green in its call to the spirit of land and all of its contours and accessories, and blue for the sky and water—in essence, those colors most suggestive of our Earthly home. One of the most popular ways we get up close and personal with this magical blue and green orb that anchors us to the cosmos is by way of gardens.

Artists, artisans, and photographers heed in their work this “call of the heart” on the part of human beings, this spiritual yearning for Mother Earth, to run our fingers through Her hair, metaphorically speaking. Claude Monet’s revered paintings of his sumptuous gardens at his estate in Giverny, France are famous examples, canvases revelatory of his singular engagement with his world, underlain principally in effervescent greens and blues. But we don’t have to travel to France to find inspiring gardens. They are everywhere within easy reach of most of us. Two special gardens near me come to mind:

Located on the southern outskirts of my home city in the Midwest region of the USA is a particular garden designed and tended exclusively by an elderly female gardener named Shirley. When I knew her, she was well into her nineties, and although her husband and contemporaries had passed on, this spritely soul sported replaced knees and hips, new body parts she put to good use every day the weather permitted, digging and pruning and dead-heading in her enormous perennial flower garden. It was a garden in which she and statues of Buddha, of Saint Francis, and of Heaven’s Angels greeted their visitors upon their arrivals and departures. While she hedged her bets in the diversity of her garden statuary, sometime during the passage of her era, attending to her garden became Shirley’s reason for living.

The other one is found a distance north of my city on an eastern embankment of the picturesque Scioto River, designed and tended solely by a woman of advanced years by the name of Teresa. At the time I knew her she was mourning the recent death of her husband but also searching bravely for her own footing in the world. Teresa was subdued then within the contours of her tragedy, but this petite bundle of Italian exuberance wouldn’t be down for long. Anyone could see this in the messages throughout her garden, one of layer upon layer of sloped, visual feasts of plants tumbling the hillside to the very rim of the river. At the garden’s summit, the portion of it closest to the house, was a sweet, little fountain-pool hosted in its center by a statue of a tiny angel. It came to my mind intuitively that therein resided Teresa’s memories, dominated by her husband by virtue of their many decades together. Teresa’s garden was a veritable memoir of her marriage, enshrined in the bearing of that teeny concrete garden angel, as well as in the poppies, hollyhocks, black-eyed Susans, and other flowers nestled among a grand selection of trees and bushes.

Gardens inspire some of us to extract their meaning on canvases, in photographs, in crafts; for others, they provide a reason for living. For still others, their gardens hold their memories. If you are like me, this spring provides an opportunity to resurrect a garden that fell to neglect last spring in the pandemic’s lockdown. There are as many reasons to experience gardens as there are plants comprising them, and whatever your motivation, the time is nigh to get back to it with abandon. In the warm days to come, give your spirit wings in a garden, nature’s springtime wardrobe of many colors, a sartorial splendor set against Earth’s fundamental blues and greens.

!!COMING SOON!!

Linda Lee Greene’s next book:

A novella titled

GARDEN OF THE SPIRITS OF THE POTS

A Spiritual Odyssey

#gardening, #gardens, #MidwestGardens, #PerennialGardens, #SciotoRiver, #ClaudeMonet, #GivernyFrance, LindaLeeGreene