With all the spare tomatoes we have in our house lately (no implication of gardening skills there, but rather, a good samaritan who regularly drops grocery bags of his harvest off on our doorstep), I have taken to making snacks like this on the weekends. It's amazing what you can do with bread, onions, tomatoes, and olive oil. I think there are a few other things in there two, but this is a great whatever-you-have-in-the-refrigerator type recipe. Broil for 5 minutes - presto!
As many of you know, I have a huge soft spot for Indian cuisine, and last month I endeavored to bring it to my kitchen! With a lot of help from friends and family, we put together a great combination of dishes including samosas, vegetarian curry, black dal makhani, naan (from scratch!), mango lassis, and the Indian-inspired chicken tikka masala. It was a fine feast - thanks to everyone who contributed recipes, ideas, and man-power to the project!
Tried out another classic from the Smitten Kitchen this weekend for a barbecue we went to on Saturday. My only mistake was making a dessert that tasted like 200 degrees on the hottest day of the year... and forgetting the ice cream! But the recipe was nevertheless a winner with an understated sweetness that you seldom get in summer pies. There was also more dough and filling than I really needed for a single pie, so I used the overflow to create this bonus tart (just for us!). The tapioca, the flaky crust, and the low sugar content... it all worked for me. Next time I hope to use my own rhubarb from the back yard - if I can get one and a half pounds to grow!!
When I have a spare minute in the day, I'm an avid reader of food blogs, but I always fascinate at how some of their writers seem to whip up a cake within the span of an hour or two during the day! For me, I have found, putting together a really great cake is an all day affair, and two weeks ago, I took a much-needed few days off - one of which I used to set about making my mother a birthday cake.
Selecting the cake is Step 1. Seven open cookbooks later, I had resorted to the Web... pasting together scraps of other recipes to satisfy my craving for an exotic yet crowd-pleasing cake for nine people, with an undercurrent of chocolate. I found the chocolate coconut cake recipe on a blog called Chocolate & Zucchini, but knew I also wanted the frosting. So I found a chocolate coconut frosting recipe online as well and headed off to Step 2: grocery shopping.
I love grocery shopping, but find myself very easily distracted, thinking of all the other things I might like to make that week, and sometimes losing track of the mission at hand. I also suddenly realized the more exotic the cake, the harder the ingredients are to find! Three stores later I was on my way to Step 3: Making the cake.
Why is it that you always get the most phone calls when you have your hands wrist deep in a bowl of blended butter and flour? The next three hours went into mixing all the ingredients, juggling the warm-up, cool-down, warm-up-again careful steps of baking, and finally throwing the whole mess inot the oven with my fingers crossed.
Inspired by a recent episode of "Baking with Julia" where guest-chef Martha Stewart showed Julia Child how to make a "simple wedding cake" for 900 or something... I decided to really put my back into the decorating part of the process. For me, that's the fun part; and while chocolate chips, coconut flakes, and almonds are no delicate marzipan cherries with toothpick sized stems, I think it came out pretty darn good!
This is Jason's audition collage for National Geographic. Okay, just kidding, but I was seriously impressed with these four shots he took of a snowy egret while we were taking in the sun on the North Shore about a week ago. I especially love the mood of each one of these shots - such a graceful bird caught in its prime against the various landscapes of the shore line. Backup career?
A few weeks ago, my sister starred in a fashion show to help raise money for an adoption and foster care mentoring program. I showed up for moral support, but was very impressed with the stories we heard, the heart of the program, and the execution of this supposedly amateur production. It seemed like a great means of getting people involved and supporting local businesses - like the boutiques who supplied the outfits for the show - at the same time. Plus, my sister looked like a rock star! Here's a shot at one of the outfits sported down the runway.
Our last stop in wine country before we left was a small vineyard called "Bouchaine." It was one of my favorites of the trip - relatively unpretentious, and we got a good overview of the area from our two hosts - much more personal attention than at some of the larger, more commercial vineyards in the area. We ended up bringing home several bottles of the delicious reds we tried here.
Sophie researched some great restaurants in the Sonoma and Napa valleys and discovered a great spot called Cindy's Backstreet Kitchen up in St. Helena. We stopped there for dinner one night and enjoyed these sensational entrees and a dessert called "Campfire Pie" - a S'mores-style oreo, marshmallow, and chocolate beauty! Would highly recommend this stop!
Another shot from our memorable girls' weekend in Napa Valley. Ceja was the first vineyard we visited in the Carneros region - ultimately one of my favorite areas of wine country! The small country roads and rolling hills reminded me of England, only with vines instead of sheep! We spend a very full weekends - Soph, Jocelyn, and I - staring through this view. How divine!
Last month, I got to experience one of the most well-esteemed restaurants in the world - Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA. Tucked away in a renovated old apartment house, this restaurant is famous for using only the freshest, organic ingredients and locally grown produce and wow, can you taste it! We dined in the upstairs cafe part of the restaurant (quite a bit cheaper and less formal than the prix fixe menu and plush accommodations downstairs). Our friends Will and Christine gave us a great tour of some of these local food shops as well, including the Cheeseboard - a store with a spectacular collection of cheeses and some well-versed fromagers! We also ducked into La Farine, Yasai Produce Market, and Cole Coffee in Rockridge for some of the tastiest bread, fruit, and coffee I could imagine. What a perfect little retreat! Berekely is truly a place for serious foodies!
We had a few friends over for dinner last weekend and tried out a few Polish recipes, from galumpkis to cucumber salad with dill to babka! It was a fun night overall, but also a goldmine of new cuisine for me... including this dead-simple recipe for a creative way to do peas. And who doesn't like peas? From Bridget Jones' (no joke) kitchen to yours, straight from Recipes from a Polish Kitchen, here is:
PUREED PEAS
Modified from Bridget Jones' Recipes from a Polish Kitchen
1 lb frozen peas
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 tbsp butter [swapped in for 6 slices smoked rindless streaky bacon sliced, for a vegetarian version]
1 clove garlic, crushed
salt and freshly ground black pepper
2/3 cup sour cream
Cook the peas in boiling water until tender - about 20 minutes. Drain and puree the peas by pressing them through a sieve or blending in a food processor or blender. Cook the onion and [butter] together for about 20 minutes until [the fat runs from the bacon and] the onion is soft, stirring frequently. Stir in the garlic, pea puree, and seasoning, then heat through. Transfer to a warmed serving dish and swirl the sour cream through the puree. Stir the cream into the puree as you are serving it.
A few weeks ago I finally took a trip to the Peabody Essex Museum with two great girlfriends and the leisure of an unplanned day! I wish I could say that I've been striving to make museum-going part of my regular routine, but I am shamefully off the circuit for such educational pasttimes! But the novelty of it all really amplified the experience for me, I think - it's been a while since I took a radio-guided tour of an exhibit! We walked through the transplanted Yin Yu Tang merchant's home from the Qing dynasty and entertained ourselves for at least three hours, wandering through its pocketed rooms. I was pleasantly surprised by the layout of the building itself, with an open-air courtyard in the center to catch and collect rain-water and light, with very few windows on the outside walls of the home. Definitely worth the trip!
There's nothing like taking a trip up north and watching people harvest their own food to recognize how self-sufficient you aren't. My friends in Vermont are actually tapping, boiling, filtering, and bottling their own syrup from three hardy trees in the back yard and have something like five gallons a day coming through right now! This shot was taken at a neighboring syrup farm where vials of syrup from each "harvest" was taken and preserved over the years (some of these date back 30-40 years!) to compare their color. Depending on the time of the season, outside consditions, nutrient level of the trees, etc., the syrups can range from light to dark (or, "fancy" to "dark amber"). Really cool to watch how it's done, but wow... that's a lot of work!
Despite the cold, it's also been another giant season of birthdays and those depicted here span October to March, and the concoction of many a novelty cake! The first is an enormous single cupcake, done by Lynn for Jason's father's birthday, and the second cake is the Espresso Chiffon Cake with Fudge Frosting picked up from the Smitten Kitchen's adaptation of Alisa Huntsman's Sky High: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes cookbook. We also enjoyed a genuine Viennese chocolate cake (an authentic gift from Austrian friends) and others to celebrate some benchmark anniversaries.
I myself have always been more a fan of fruit pies and chocolate mousse than cookies and cakes, but birthday's reliably scream for cake and candles are getting so fun these days, that how can you resist?
Does anyone else feel like they're a couple of seasons behind? I definitely do, so here's a shot from the fall in Connecticut of apple picking season! Actually, a really fun day to look back on - one of the first times I'd hung out with my new sister-in-law without the guys. I am still eating apples - not this batch, of course - in the chilly rain, waiting for spring...
