Filed under: Cooking
When you try something and it’s good. Make it again!! April did just this when she made Paula Dean’s Fresh Fruit Tart, (actually she made 2) to take to a 2nd Story (which is an awesome storytelling group that present stories monthy, check it out) Workshop meeting. They were a hit!
She even got fan e-mail about them so I advice you whip one up for the next event you’re headed to. The tart can be twisted to fit any assortment of fruits. April’s included strawberries, mango, kiwi and grapes. mmm… I got to take a piece for breakfast when leftovers returned home, and !!!!! OH MY GOD. Better than before. I want more tart!!! Pie. anything really. i love it all.
Filed under: Random Facts
Lunch at work is usually an array of containers (packaged by the lovely April for my consumption) full of a variety of leftovers and new items. And sometimes it gets a little out of control.
This meal from last week contained
1. light blue lid: condiments for hot dog including mustard, ketchup, onions, relish, tomatos
2. white ramekin: raspberry jello with blackberries
3. dark blue lid: pineapple chunks
4. bottle of ranch dressing for green salad
5. tupperware with green salad
6. baggie with lemon cake muffin (Oh my god these were good!! From and issue of Martha’s “Great Food Fast” magazine that I picked up for free at a garage sale a couple days before! Praise to Ilana for fine preparations!)
7. hot dog: awaiting condiments from above
8. container of “oriental fansy mix” as sold by edgewater produce containing, peanuts, wasabi peas, pumpkin seeds, cashes and rice crackers
9.bag of rice crackers from Trader Joes. (the number of rice cracker sin #8 just wasn’t sufficient for me. find a replacement!!)
I used to carry this mass of containers to work in whatever random bag I happened to grab that morning, but have now stepped it up with a fine little insulated Lunch Bag. Well not so little. It’s too large to fit in the fridge easily, so while the container journey to and from work in this bag they still get stored in the mini-fridge at work individually. Still a step up though. which makes me think now…. IT”S TIME FOR LUNCH!!!
Filed under: Cooking
It was a weekend for grilling. Our neighbors thought so too. You come out back to undress (take the cover off) the grill and notice that your neighbors have already done the same. “What ya grilling?” “Chicken kabobs” he replied. “I’m making chicken breasts myself.”
Of course we smothered ours in pesto and ate them with a delightful side of potato salad (made almost per April’s grandmothers recipe, with a few of our porch herbs thrown in) and a spinach/shitake/quinoa/feta salad by martha that has become one of our favourties. 🙂
Yes we have restarted our porch garden, i’ll have to get some good photos once things get warmer here and the plants grow a little bit more. We have a couple tomatos, some jalapeno peppers and a ton of herbs. (Which is really the part I’m most excited about). Fresh herbs are the best thing, and can be quite expensive at the store. Growing them on your own makes them readily available and FREE (after the initial plant investment of course, but after 1 or 2 uses the plants really pay for themselves). We did have a strawberry plant until last week (which we have now deduced that the dog ate it. Strawberries aren’t poisonous to dogs, but her stomach was not exactly happy (“Was that your stomach?” I questioned April, “No” she replied and then added “It wasn’t yours??” at which point we both look under the table to find an unhappy dog who when let down into the yard ate grass while I grilled)
But… grill season is setting upon us (even if it is only 55 degrees outside right now, a little frustrating for June 3rd, alas warmer weather is coming, I feel it) and I’m excited to get back out there. Which is why I was excited to find this article titled “How to Grill (Almost) Everything” at Chow.com I want to try the “Grilled Vegetable Sandwich with Egg Salad and Bacon” with our veggie friends J&R (minus the bacon of course for them), but they look super tasty!!!
I don’t have any good excuses. So I won’t try to make a grandiose apology. It’s been too long. I’m coming back!!!
Of course, maybe I should have waited to share a more recent eating/cooking/dining experience. But I’m feeling the impulse, and don’t want to push it off and watch more time go by before I post again.
So… here’s a few pics of stuff I managed to snap along the way in the past two months since I’ve put anything new up.
Strawberry Whipped Cream cake (April 23rd) , from Chow.com which April made for me after I e-mailed her with an “I want This” e-mail 🙂 Super Awesome!!!
And there will be new to come!!! Yeah 3 day weekend comingup!!!
Filed under: Uncategorized
Eat This Book by Ryan Nerz.
2 Stars. Entertaining, but more fluff. There were a few glimpses into the people behind the personalities of the Competitive Eating Circuit, but on a whole I was left feeling like I had watched a 5 minute news excerpt. The kind of story that might be presented on local news after one of the local food contests was presented. Eh.
It happens every year. I should come to expect it, but it still trips me up. I’ve fallen behind on my reading. I made it to Week 9. The redeeming part is that I fell behind on my Food reading. While I did not complete my food book (I was on vacation remember) I did finish the second half of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and also listed to Chokeby Chuck Palahnuik on CD. So two books in one week really… just not food related. I do hope to make up for lost time and back read for Week 9, but…
Week 10 – Heat {An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany} By Bill Buford
Ilana is my reigning champion for book recommendations. SHOUT OUT!!! This is the third on the list of ones she suggested and she has chosen a winner. I guess when your friend is a Creative Writing Grad Student who left the culinary world of catering and restaurants though, recommending good food books comes naturally. PROPS!!
This book was very entertaining, and while focusing on a wide variety of experiences, he strings them all together in a cohesive manner that keeps the reader interested. Never having worked in a professional kitchen (Taking orders on a pre-printed pad at Rollies Hot-Dogs when I was 17 doesn’t really count) I am still amazed at the incredible effort, blood sweat and tears that go into churning out food at a restaurant. In Heat, we get a glimpse into the inner working of Mario Batali’s Italian restaurant Babbo. We witness the madness of learning to work the grill station. Moving up from prep work to want to make the Pasta. What a task. Overwhelming really.
In addition to all the effort and work Bill puts into learning food and cooking at Babbo, he also makes incredible efforts to complete training that Mario Batali completed, by traveling to Italy and learning pasta from the same woman that Mario did, and then travelling to Tuscany where Batali’s father learned butchery from Dario and the Maestro. Super fascinating.
My love for Italian food too makes me love this book even more. The day I finished it I met up with my old roommate Stacia for dinner, where we dined at Spacca Napoli on these fine pizzas.
The menu there is all in Italian and the waitress helped us out with explanations adding “The owner is the only one who speaks Italian, the rest of us have to figure it out along with you” HA! But it seemed so fitting in a pizza place where the owner spent a great deal of time in Italy learning pizza and then imported his crazy expensive wood-burning hand crafted stove to replicate the tastes for here in Chicago. Cheers to you!!! And to any others out there like Bill Buford who go to the source to learn the original.
4 Stars. Read this book.
Filed under: Cooking
Our second nite in Wisconsin treated us to Cornish Hens stuffed with couscous, almonds and dried apricots, with a side of steamed broccoli in olive oil and orange zest! Soooooo cute!!! and super tasty. Double bonus tokens all around.
The Cornish Hens were a discovery from a Food and Wine Herbs and Spices cookbookI picked up at a garage sale this summer. It’s kind of fascinating in it’s organization. There are of course different ways of organizing cookbooks. Some seem to follow a meal progression with appetizers up front, main dishes, sides, desserts, drinks. Others follow the seasons from Summer to Fall into Winter and Spring pairing fresh ingredients from each time period with recipes to enjoy. But this cookbook listed recipes by main spice or herb. The cornish hens were from the Cinnamon section. The couscous was flavored with cinnamon and cooked ahead of time before being stuffed inside the hen for roasting. The moisture made the hen super juicy and tasty. I guess that couscous with apricots and a cinnamon flavour is a traditional North African food stuff. However my guess is putting it inside the poultry may not be so common?? I don’t really know though. My knowledge of life in North Africa is limited at best. Non-existent may be a better sum up. But anywhoozle, this was a tasty treat, although as April said, Cornish Hens are super cute with an individual one for each guest, but a chicken would work just as well and would cost a whole lot less!!! Ah well, vacation is for experimenting and doing things you might not normally do. Well at least my version of vacation is, and April went with it this time 🙂
Filed under: Cooking
Ah. Vacation. Last week we spent some time away from home, holed up in a cute little cabin located in Twin Lakes Wisconsin. We took the time to relax with the dog, make fires, read Harry Potter and of course cook!!! The cabin was outfitted with a full kitchen which fit our needs quite well. We planned our meals and brought all our food with us (although we later learned the local Sentry grocery store was well stocked and shopping could have easily been done up there. They even had white asparagus. You can’t find that stuff at most of the local stores!!!) We did bring some pans with us, and this was good as the mismatched oddness of what was available wouldn’t have suited our needs. Of course when we told our friends about our trip and the things we brought with us they laughed. A microplane and a ricer aren’t on most peoples lists, but we took the time to be adventurous with new food stuffs. Our first nite there I made a sweet potato gnocchi and April made an Asparagus salad with orange, onion and goat cheese. Scrumptious!!!
I’ve never made gnochhi before, and while there were a few snags, the finished product was quite tasty. If you believe Martha Stewart (and I do) a ricer is key to making gnocchi. It mashes the potatoes and adds an airiness to the batter which is essential to a good final product. The potato gets pushed thru a fine mesh that mashes the potato into fine bits, that can then easily be mixed with the other ingredients. The sweet potato (5medium) got combined with 3C all-purpose flour, 1C chopped watercress, 2 finely chopped garlic cloves, and salt and pepper to taste. The mixture was very sticky (I needed more flour, but didn’t have any extra with us) and was a little hard to work with and form into little balls to cross hatch with a fork as in the traditional method of preparation. They looked more like lumps. Little orange lumps. Toss the lumps into boiling water for a couple of minutes until they come bobbing to the surface. Then, they needed to be popped under the broiler for another 8 or 9 minutes until light golden brown before topping with Parmesan and parsley. Serve.
The salad was also super tasty. The asparagus were blanched in boiling water for a couple of minutes. Just enough to soften them a little bit and bring out the bright green color. They were tossed with orange slices, red onion and goat cheese and mixed with a dressing made from fresh squeezed orange juice, red wine vinegar and a few other flavourings (I wasn’t in charge, and dont’ have the recipe with me) but ooh ooh ooh. Asparagus is oh so tasty!!!
Oh vacation. I miss you so much already!!!
Filed under: Books
Swindled: The Dark Hisotry of Food Fraud, From Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee. By Bee Wilson
What a read. Nowadays in the the U.S. some of the biggest “swindles” seem to focus on organic food as an escape from the “adulteration” of our foods with pesticides. (There are of course all the additives, flavourings, colorings and preservatives in processed foods, but that’s a whole other story) The book talks about this kind of adulteration but also gives us a rich background of adulterations of food with things like arsenic, plaster of paris, bark and clay. Things that have no nutritional value and some things that will kill you. While they don’t occur very often in the US they aren’t completely gone. but there are still food scares that happen nowadays that are more like some of the historic examples in the book. Panics like the melamine in milk coming from China being one of the most recent.
The book gives a great history of the swindles that have been carried out over the histories of England and the US. Bee Wilson argues that worries about swindles arose as societies moved from an agrarian to an industrial culture. As people became further and further distanced from their food stuffs they were more and more and liable to be given something false, of lower quality, substitutions in general crappier products. Really to be living in this day and age in the US where food Nutrition labels are on most everything, detailing out ingredients, calories, fats, proteins, sugars. It really is amazing. You used to get something and have no idea what they might be putting in it. Coffee laced with chicory, bark and acorns. Bread made with alum (to make it whiter and more desirable). Candies coated with lead and copper compounds which gave them bright green yellow and red colors.
After reading this book the drive to eat more “whole foods”, things that come from nature and have an easy name like chicken, peppers, apples, asparagus, eggs and milk is even stronger. (These items still have the ability to be swindled in the way they are grown and raised but they still rate much higher than any processed foods). We have been doing this quite well for a while now, and it just makes so much more sense to me. Eating this way makes grocery trips so much easier, and reasons out why I like small markets like Devon Market and Harvesttime foods. When you eat more “whole foods” you end up doing most of your shopping in the produce and meat and dairy sections. The exceptions for other aisles include getting items like olive oils, beans, pasta and rice. But really that’s only 2 additional aisles I need to travel down. In general when you buy and eat this way you know what you’re getting. There is of course processing for milk and yogurt and there are additives in these foods, but the lists are much shorter than what you might find on the side of a box of oreos. I mean really, what is in an Oreo?? You would be hardpressed to make something like it at home, although, as the book points out, there is a website where people try to make giant at home versions of processed foods. The results are strange and kind of mystifying. Check this one of giant Oreo at www.pimpthatsnack.com.
Four Stars. Read this Book!!!
There are of course millions of variations and this is a variation on a Martha recipe. I was raised on a rather simple version of elbow macaroni and grated mild cheddar. Yes that’s it. That’s my mom’s cooking for ya! Simple! To the point!! I still prefer this 2 ingredient version, but instead prefer the small shell over the elbow macaroni. But… this time around the recipe included the Ropp Blue Cheddar cheese we purchased at the Winter Farmers Market 2 weeks ago mixed with a more 
standard medium yellow cheddar from the Devon Market. I started with one of Martha’s many different recipes (this one from Everyday Food) for Macaroni and Cheese and changed it up by of course swapping out kinds of cheese, using low fat milk, whole wheat small shells, whole grain bread and leaving out the ham. Results 2.5 stars out of 4. While flavor was tasty (the blue cheddar gave it a nice pungent kick), it lost that creaminess and had a kind of grainy texture. 😦 Who knows what the exact cause was, The blue cheddar was a bit more crumbly than moist (as some blues tend to be) so perhaps this was the downfall, or perhaps it was the lowfat milk. Cooking time. Reduction of milk. I dont’ have enough experience to tell you where this went wrong. Hopefully I’ll have better luck next time. Do you have a favourite mac and cheese recipe? Or place to order it?
Mmm... Food 