The 2013 Winter Coffee Mugs are here and are available while supplies last. The 2013 Winter colors are Light Teal with a Cinnamon/ White Glaze and Black with a Sand White Glaze. Both of these mugs are available only in the Barrel shape.
All of our mugs are hand thrown by a potter from Deneen Pottery in Minnesota In this day of Chinese assembly line products, our mugs are American craftsmanship at it’s best.
If you are interested in purchasing a mug, please call me at 903-665-9511. The mugs are $18 plus tax and I will ship them directly to you.
A few weeks back, I was proud to have Bob Griffin, his beautiful wife Denise, and their dog Sport come and spend a few days with me here at the Carriage House. For those of you not in the Shreveport TV air space, Bob is the weekend anchor on KTBS, Channel 3. Before his tenure with Channel 3, he was with KSLA Channel 12 also in the Shreveport area.
Bob never stops working and his passion for what he does was evident during his stay here. He is a “news man” at his very heart.
He put together a 3 minute video on the Carriage House and all the things he enjoyed about his stay. He was most impressed with our pet friendly accommodations and the fact that you can walk to just about anywhere from right here at the Carriage House.
I hope you enjoy this video. Here ya go!!! Enjoy!!
Like everyone else, we have a project list about a mile long.
One of our many projects is to get some awesome breakfast photos for our website. So I commissioned my favorite photographer, Tom, and we had a photo shoot this morning right after breakfast. The Pasta Frittata was colorful and really did photograph well! As is not unusual for us, we were quickly distracted by cleaning and giving directions to the guests. When we walked back into the kitchen we had a surprise. The plate had been licked clean and The Bug was looking very guilty!!
It ain’t easy being an innkeeper. The hours are long and the laundry never seems to end. There is always one room that needs to be cleaned or needs some sort of repair. You live your life in a constant state of being one project behind where you should be.
However, there are some real pluses to the job. We LOVE our guests (really do!). We get to experiment in the kitchen a lot (not always with good results) and we get to live in a beautiful old home full of stories and charm. One of the other big pluses to the job is drinking awesome coffee…every morning.
I did not realize that I had become a coffee snob until last week.
Tom and I went to the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) Innkeeping show in Little Rock, AR. It was awesome!! I got to see some friends I only see once a year and learn some amazing cool things (watch for some new stuff to come).
However, the coffee in the hotel and at the show was AWFUL. I mean really AWFUL!! I mean rot gut! Blech!!
We have been ordering our coffee from a roaster in Shreveport called Jelks Coffee for some time now. We change the flavors for the season and order whole bean so that we grind fresh coffee every morning. Right now we are working our way through Mardi Gras/ Valentines Day flavors. We drink what the guests drink and I forgot what bad coffee tastes like. YUCK!!
We spent a lot of time at this year’s show talking about why bed and breakfasts are a “Better Way to Stay” then hotels. Well here is one reason. We will NEVER serve you a bad cup of coffee ever and we will ALWAYS serve your coffee in a fabulous mug (think a Deneen Pottery Mug) not a Styrofoam cup.
A good cup of coffee to start the day really does make us a Better Way to Stay!!
After spending the last 8 weeks doing some major restoration work on the Carriage House B&B, we are almost ready to begin serving breakfast to our guests again. We had to shut down the kitchen (and the main house) to do our final push in remodeling and the restoration of this 130 year old house. We have been restoring this old house for almost two years now and this is the big (hopefully) final push.
The kitchen was ancient and not in a cool antique way but in an out of date wiring and leaky plumbing kind of way. The appliances were beyond awful. They were unlevel and cooked inconsistently. The counter tops were cracked and the cabinets had holes in them. It was a hobby of Tom’s and mine to complain about the kitchen.
So we spent a couple of years planning our new kitchen and decided that the best time to do the work was in the slow season which is the heat of the summer for us. It has been a grueling process that tested both our patience and our good natures at times but we are almost done. All that is left is to paint and do the nit-picky stuff.
Friday night we cooked our first meal in the kitchen. We made up a batch of Mama Ronchi’s Marinara sauce. It is Sunday morning and we are making a mess and fixing breakfast (only for ourselves).
It feels good to be back! Life is starting to get back to normal.
Next week, we officially reopen the kitchen and the main house for guests. Come on by sometime and we will show you all of the awesome changes that we made.
We hit another big milestone this week. The new kitchen cabinets are being installed. Finally this is beginning to look like a real kitchen and not just a big empty room.
We decided to go with a light maple color since the old cabinets were very dark. The old kitchen had a feeling of being in a cave and I was constantly complaining about having to cook int he dark. Our plan is to make the new kitchen very light and bright. We want to it be a cheerful and pleasant place to work.
The latest round of renovations on the Carriage House B&B have begun! The painters started yesterday replacing the rotten wood on the house and prepping the exterior for the first coat of paint. I am looking forward to being on the other side of this project but it is also fun seeing the progress on this old house.
Don’t forget that we are running a Renovation Special this summer. $79 for any room, any night, no breakfast (since the kitchen will be under construction as well.) Just call us at 903-665-9511 or book online at www.carriagehousejefferson.com
So the Carriage House Bed and Breakfast’s crazy Italian chef has been at it once again. It is Valentine’s Day and the big guy is making some very romantic Strawberry Mascarpone Crepes for our guests. Watch while he shows us his amazing technique for flipping crepes. Only a true pro could show such mastery!
So our crazy Italian chef has been in the kitchen all morning making the family secret recipe for marinara sauce. I have been trying to sneak in behind him and get the recipe but he is too quick and wylie for me. Plus he has been using those spice bottles marked “secret ingredient”. What could they be!?!
For those of you who have stayed with us before, you already know this story. For those of you that are our future guests, Chef Tom’s Nona (grandmother) came over to this country on the boat through Ellis Island to New York from Italy. She single handedly raised two children in a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language (sound familiar). Like all parents, she wanted the best for her children and so she worked herself to the bone so that she could send her kids to parochial school and provide a comfortable life for them.
Now for the fun part of Mama Ronchi’s story…the family lore. She was apparently a very gifted seamstress. So much so that she was able to charge $2,000 a suit back in 1910s and 1920s. Now think about it, $2,000 is a lot of money for a suit today, a 100 years later, and back then in the teens and 20s that had to be just an incredible amount of money to spend on anything, especially a suit. The family legend has it that the only people that could afford one of her suits were members of the Family… the Italian mob.
For years Chef Tom would talk about his Nona’s cooking, especially breakfast. She didn’t prepare any frou frou waffles or fancy tarts. It was old fashioned comfort food full of sausage, eggs, peppers, and potatoes. Chef Tom tried to duplicate the recipe from his memory in our test kitchen but never quite got it right. Then a few years back, we were cleaning out Tom’s mother’s home when we ran across an old cookbook. I picked it up and out fell two stained and yellowed 3×5 index cards. One was marked marinara and the other marked scramble. Apparently Tom’s mother had at some point spent the day following Mama Ronchi around in the kitchen writing down everything that she was doing. Success!! We finally had the recipe. We came back to Jefferson and ran both recipes through the test kitchen and they were in a word…amazing.
We now consider Mama Ronchi’s Mafia Scramble to be our signature dish. Trust me, you can’t get anything like this at any other Bed & Breakfast in Jefferson. An old historic recipe served at an old historic house in an old historic town. It just seems fitting.
So on this snowy and blustery day, our crazy Italian Chef Tom is in the kitchen making the family secret recipe for the marinara. He would tell me what is in it but then he would have to kill me. You know how it is with these mob chefs.
I am always looking for new and decadent recipes to serve my guest. We serve a multi-course gourmet breakfast and Tom and I split the cooking duties. He focuses on the main entree and I focus on the appetizer. I love serving fruit dishes for our first course. I think it really opens up the palate for Tom’s main course.
Many of our guests ask for our recipes and so I decided that I will start to post some of our fan favorites for everyone to try. Here is the first one. Our guests just rave about this one. You can always tell if people really like it or if they are just being polite by the amount of food that comes back to the kitchen. We never have any leftovers with this one.
Grand Oranges and Strawberries
Prep Time 30 Min
Cook Time 5 Min
Chill Time 8 hrs
1/2 cup orange marmalade
1 1/2 cups sparkling white grape juice (chilled)
1/4 cup Grand Marnier
10 to 12 large navel oranges
2 cups sliced fresh strawberries
Melt marmalade in a small saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly; remove from heat, and let cool slightly.
Stir together marmalade, white grape juice, and grand marnier in a large serving dish or bowl until blended. Add orange sections, and gently stir. Cover and chill for 8 hours.
Add strawberries to the oranges in the bowl, and gently toss to coat. Serve in parfait bowls with a mint sprig for a garnish.
