Happy Chicken Egg Farm!

These photos (from California, when I was there on holiday) are long-in-coming, but I thought I should share them with you eventually... Recently, a friend of the family from my homeschool days began raising chickens in her backyard for eggs, and my family has become a very happy customer of hers. The eggs that we receive from Pam Franklin's fat Rhode Island Reds are petite, mauve-coloured little gems of rich, eggy goodness (best enjoyed soft-boiled, and on toast, of course! We all know the passion I possess for soft-cooking...)

I apologize that these photos aren't the best, but I think they do what I want them to:



(These eggs were still warm! I may or may not have swiped them from underneath one of the "girls." My mum was kind enough to hold them while I took pictures...)

A Hectic Week-End

As I sit now at my cozy little desk with my tea and a notebook, and the lovely Amiina playing delicate snow-music despite the sunshine, I cannot say that I could be more grateful for a quiet afternoon after such a hectic Manhattan week-end. I shall not go into great detail of each of my days, but I can say that I accomplished several "firsts" in New York this last week.

i. I went to my first East-Coast antiques show! Antiquing is an entirely different affair over here--the market trends are far different, the average age of the objets d'art is far older. There seems to be a much bigger market for folk art, curiosities, portraits (especially miniatures and silhouettes) and Americana over here. Also, the booths at the show were set up differently--much sparser and more decorative, as opposed to the full-to-bursting booths you see in San Francisco. No particular luck with finds, although we stumbled upon a fantastic dealer in art nouveau and arts and crafts glass and pottery that offered incredibly reasonable prices for works of greater quality than I've ever seen outside of Antiques Roadshow.

ii. Attended my first gallery-party thing in Tribeca, in a space that was part living arrangemet, part dance floor, and lots of splattered paint. The guy who owns it is apparently going to turn it into a gallery... we'll see, I suppose.

iii. My first-ever rock-opera puppet show, complete with puppet sex! Live band and puppets with ska-influenced music and silly drunken-puppet singing. Definitely a lot of fun... although I don't know quite what else to make of it!

Also, I want to record the delicious places I ate for future reference:

i. Stumptown Coffee and the adjoining Breslin Bar, where my sweetheart and I enjoyed some phenomenal espresso, a leek-and-goat-cheese tart, and an escarole salad with fresh pears and a light Gorgonzola dressing (great food, and a fun venue--both are attached to the lobby of the Ace Hotel in Midtown, with a funky '30's-modern space for eating, lounging, and free wi-fi)

ii. Cosmic Cantina--a cheap, vegetarian, organic burrito joint with four varieties of homemade organic tortillas (flour, whole-wheat flour, corn, and spelt) and kick-ass guacamole.

iii. Les Halles Brasserie, owned by Anthony Bourdain, a French brewery with good food, lovely help, a neat space. Moderately priced, with twenty-dollar steaks of every sort and a good "Paris-cafe" spread. The crème brulée was to die for...

Anyhow, that's my weekend in a nutshell. I may be taking a little day-trip in a few days to Montauk, if we get a snowstorm... M. Benjamin and I are dead-set on seeing a snowy beach! Meet you in Montauk, everyone....

As I Make Yet Another Cup of Tea...

Well, here I am back on the East Coast, enjoying my first real morning in my cozy little room in Bronxville. It is both lovely and strange to have returned to New York--strange mostly because it was colder in California when I left than it is in the East, which has disappointed me entirely (Who comes to New York in January and finds it warmer than their central-California home? Honestly, Jack Frost, where are your priorities?), and lovely because, the more time I spend here, the more I love the quiet quaintness of Eastern forests and peaceful independence of my own routine.

Tuesday, the day I arrived at JFK, was my and my Sweetheart's two-year anniversary, so we enjoyed our (final) long-distance reunion at Grand Central station, and a lovely dinner together. Two years after we met fatefully in Anaheim, we've finally been able to give up this wretched long-distance business to settle down within a half-hour of each other. He's already finding his experience at the School of Visual Arts to be both pleasurable and beneficial, and is enjoying Manhattan. It's so incredible to know that, from where I sit in Bronxville, I could enjoy his company with a mere train ride into the city...

On top of being so near my gentleman friend, it is ice to slip into my oh-so-beloved morning routine here. I awaken (or, more am awoken by roommate), open the blinds and the windows that look out on Mead Way, where the squirrels nest in the tall conifers, make tea (currently, Ahmad English Tea No. 1 with a little sugar and heavy cream), scoop some Greek yoghurt for breakfast and doll it up with honey, wheat germ, and whole flax seeds, check all my favourite blogs, call my mum, pour a bath and soak while reading Dorian Gray, dress in all the necessary layers to brave New York winters in a skirt, enjoy another cup of tea, and then off to class (or, lunch). I love to watch the squirrels and the nuthatches scrabbling around the tree trunks from my lovely perch on the wide windowsill. I love the quiet murmuring of the water about to boil in my mug.

Before I wax too terribly romantic about life here in the East, I shall depart to shop for a microwave egg boiler (such blasphemy, yes, but I make do with what I have!) and learn how to make toast on my radiator... And for those of you who love toast as much as I do, you should pop over to The Art of Toast to read all about the warm, crispy goodness!

Home Sweet Home

For my first big cooked meal home, my Mum and I made a huge pot of our favourite vegetarian minestrone soup. This is a staple wintertime recipe in our household, and we alter it continually depending on what's in season and whether or not we want meat. Neither of us can remember where we found the basic recipe, but perhaps it was the newspaper? Anyhow, here are some shots of the lovely heap of produce we put into this pot:

This is why, despite what I say, I love California. Look at these bee-YOO-tee-ful veggies!Clockwise from top left: zucchini, mushrooms, cabbage, carrots, curly kale, string beans, celery, and spinach.
Even our compost pile is pretty!

The pot filling up with spinach...


Here's our recipe (for this pot--sometimes we add ground hamburger or different veggies)

Minestrone Soup

Chop and add to pot the following:
1 cup onions
1 cup celery
2 cups carrots
2 cups cabbage
1 cup kale
1 cup spinach
1 cup zucchini
1 cup mushrooms
5 cloves garlic
1 cup green beans
Add:
1 28-oz can tomatoes
1 49 1/2-oz can vegetable broth
1 15-oz can white beans
4 cups water
1/2 tsp. red chili flakes
1 1/2 tsp. Italian Seasoning
s&p to taste
Simmer 2-3 hours and serve with a dash of grated Parmesan cheese (or not, if you're vegan!)
And, due to our late start at getting this pot on the stove, we staved off our hunger with a little appetizer of kalamata olive bread and smoked Gouda from our local farmer's market, and a beautiful Cameo apple:

And the Dreaded Conference Weeks Begin...

Stopped in for a quick lunch between conferences and its coziness on this blustery day felt worthy of a picture:


This is some organic butternut quash soup from my cute little local health food store, a slice of thick wheat bread, and some chunked-up provolone. Those are my cute little s&p shakers there on my laptop.

Almost done with my poetry conference project, a series of poems on quiet things called Tree Songs and a Second Winter, a title I'm raw-ther happy with at this point. All the poetry I've written this semester has finally been put up on my stubborn Livejournal, so please take a gander? Tree Songs isn't up yet, but expect it sometime next week.

Well, must be off to work on my History of Photography conference paper. Twenty pages, due next Friday. Eep. Prayers, zats (and ducks, if Amina is reading this) are all welcome, if anyone has any to spare!

Pozole Verde (Another Recipe, I know--but I'm a Mad Cooking Fiend)

Last night's dinner was an old home favourite or mine that my mom and I invented by combining some recipes a few years ago. Being from California, Mexican dishes are a staple in the household, and pozole--a pork-hominy soup with fresh veggies--is a favourite this time of year. This a leaner version of the traditional, with chicken breasts instead of ham-hocks, and a little prettier, as all the ingredients are white and green. Especially nice when the cream cheese melts into the broth. :) Also, this recipe easily feeds 6-8 people--but the broth base freezes well! I wish I'd thought to take another picture with the bowls full of all the fixings, but this will have to do--


2 lg cans chicken broth (49-1/2 oz each)
2 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breasts (4-6)
1 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
2 lg onions, cut into large chunks
1 lg can (29 oz) yellow or white hominy

Add-ins--
chopped green onion
lettuce
avocados
cubed cream cheese
toasted tortilla strips (flour tortillas cut into thin strips and toasted dry in the oven at 400 for five-ten minutes)
green salsa
fresh cilantro
lime wedges

Combine broth, chicken, oregano, cumin seeds, and onions.
Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 1/2 hour.
Strain broth and return to pot; reserve the chicken, toss out onions and herbs.
Shred or dice the chicken, and return to the pot with the can of hominy.
Heat ten-fifteen more minutes.

We serve all the add-ins in bowls or on a platter on the table and add them directly to individual bowls of the hot soup.

A Culinary Adventure

Had a quiet day at home today with the Mister, reading and lazing about. We decided to invent a way to use up the excess of persimmons that my family has been receiving from a neighbor with a producing tree (the "hachiya" variety, which are nearly impossible to use unless they are near-rotten) and our results ended up fantastic. Here's our new (and highly successful) recipe...


Persimmon Tilapia on a Salad of Fennel and Fresh Herbs

For the salad:
Roughly chop a head of fennel into fork-manageable pieces, along with a handful of fresh herbs (we used basil, cilantro, and flat-leaf parsley). Toss together and dress very lightly with olive oil.

For the tilapia:
Dress fillets with a little garlic-infused olive oil (or just plain), some lemon zest, a little bit of lemon juice (no more than a half-teaspoon per fillet) and some fresh chopped fennel fronds. Bake at 400° F for about ten minutes, add a couple teaspoons of butter, then bake for five more minutes. We put it under the broiler for two minutes at the end, but this is optional.

For the persimmon sauce:
Start by melting 1 tbs butter in a pan over medium. Add about 1 tsp brown sugar, and let it melt. Add 2 tbs hachiya persimmon flesh (very ripe) and 1 clove minced garlic. Turn the heat down to medium-low to let the garlic soften, and andd a pinch each of ground cinnamon, ground cloves, and cayenne pepper, and a smidgen (maybe 1/2 tsp red-wine vinegar). Let cook down, then add 2-3 tbs white wine (we used a Bogle chardonnay). Finish with 1-2 more tbs of butter.

Lay the tilapia fillets on a bed of the fennel salad, drizzle with the persimmon sauce, and enjoy with some rice and/or crusty bread with a hard white cheese!

Scanwiches

I have, through the wonderful Gourmet magazine website, discovered a food blog unlike any I have ever seen. Check it out for yourself:

Scanwiches Blog

It's just scans of delicious-looking sandwiches. Bizarre and entrancing. Try clicking on one of the photos in order to make it bigger. So worth it.

Happy Birthday, Annette! We MacCrackers Love You!

Today is Good Buddy Annette's birthday, and the girls and I had a night out on the town last night in celebration. Here's a collage of our evening in words and pictures:

Exhibit 1: Massive quantities of Thai food at Aura on 9th Ave. consumed: Tom Ka, a soup of lime and coconut juice with herbs and mushrooms, Pad Thai, lemongrass chicken with green papaya salad, beef salad with cucumbers, tomatoes, and lots of chili, cashew nut chicken, and Thai iced teas and coconut juice. Here are Annette and Dana with the leftovers. They actually had to pull over another table to accommodate all our food. :)

Followed by coffee on Times Square's Red Steps. India provides Dana with her caffeinated sustenance.

My abnormally high body temperature regulates Jamie's abnormally low one. So does my scarf. I look like I'm giving her a power headlock, though.



Bright lights, big city.
India looking like a villain on the subway. Jamie looking pensive. That's Annette's arm in the red.
All of us on the Red Steps in Times Square: me, Annette, India, Dana, and Jamie. I wish Parisa had been there, as well, but she's home in California for her cousin's wedding. Sound familiar? Anyhow, that was our fabulous celebration of Annette's eighteenth in the city (New York is The City for me now. So intensely strange) and we had a lovely time. Happy birthday, my friend!

A Happy Samhain to All, and to All, a Good Night

Yesterday was Halloween, the overwhelmingly favourite holiday of myself and my peers. The holiday this year was made particularly pleasant by the presence in New York of my own darkling, one Mister Michael Benjamin Herndon. We spent the day at the New York Botanical Gardens, in the Bronx, with a couple of all-garden passes and pic-nic for two. It was a beautiful, mild, drizzly day and we ate a delicious lunch of goat's milk brie, baguette, tortellini salad with cherry tomatoes, and Bartlett pears before we meandered about the garden taking in the phenomenal autumn colours. Here are some photos--







You can see how bleakly beautiful October is here. I wish I could just bottle it up.

And, of course, it simply isn't Halloween without a party or two! My lady friends here on Campus invited me to a party at the Harlem apartment of a friend of theirs, so M. Benjamin and I dressed up (he as a Red Hat Lady, and I as Artemis, the goddess of the hunt) and went with Jamie into the city for the evening. We met Dana, Annette, India, and her boyfriend Nick there and stayed till nearly one before heading back home. Here are more pictures for you:


There's Michael Benjamin as a Red Hat Lady. Stunning, don't you think? I particularly like the post-menopausal whiskers he has going on there...


India and Nick getting sexy with the pizza.

The MacCracken Ladies, from left: Dana, India, me, and Annette. Jamie had already left and Parisa hadn't come along, but with those two, the six of us plan on living together next year.

So that's it! Hope your Halloween was as much fun as mine!

L'Automne Vive!

Today was the most beautiful autumn day that I have just about ever seen. It was brilliantly sunny and clear, around 65-70 degrees all day--just perfect for a light cardigan--and the colours were all freshened and brightened up from yesterday's rains. I enjoyed some lounging about on the North Lawn, reading The Poetics of Natural History, and feasting on a sack lunch of first-crop California almonds (thank you, Grandpapa and Grandmama!), figs, radishes, clementines, ginger-lemon cookies, and a petite peanut-butter-and-strawberry-peach-jam sandwich. I sipped oolong from the TeaHaus (don't you just love it when you can pay for something entirely in coins? It makes me feel one part starving artist and one part Regency maiden...) and reclined at a pic-nic table to enjoy my reading. I've finished the first essay, on father-and-son naturalist duo John and William Bartram, who lived in the Eastern US during the later half of the eighteenth century. I daresay this book is a fantastic read, and turning out to be a perfect source for my Photography conference paper on scientific illustration and photography.

Anyhow, I must say I indulged myself once again with the foliage through my lens, so here are a few more photographs--





Here's the leftover compost of my lunch:

Overall, a lovely afternoon.

Jamie and I went to see Bright Star at the Bronxville Clearview Cinemas last night. It was an indulgently beautiful film, one which entranced me from the opening close-up of a needle and thread weaving carefully in and out of a sheet of fabric. Bring hankies, ladies (and gentlemen). It's lovely, but tragic...

From the Top of the Rocks

Well, yesterday was Laura's birthday, so we spent the evening in the city. It's a funny thing, but the whole experience made me feel, for the first time, that I'm actually living here in New York.

We took a train into Grand Central and then hopped the Subway from there to our first destination, a lovely Mexican restaurant called Rosa Mexicano. While the entrées were priced a bit outside our budgets, we took advantage of their sizable and reasonably priced appetizer menu to build for ourselves a meal. Jamie and Laura each ordered the tortilla soup for a "first course," and were surprised to see it come to the table in two vessels apiece: they were each given a bowl with a little heap of chicken, fried tortilla strips, queso fresco, and avocado, and then our server poured in over the mound a thick, brick-red soup. I ordered the house salad to start off, which was a pile of mixed greens, shredded carrots and jicama, quarters red and yellow grape tomatoes, and a delicate, sweet-and-spicy vinaigrette with mint and sweet peppers.

Just when we thought it couldn't get any better, we got our second dishes. Laura and Jamie had ordered the flautas and taquitos, respectively, and I ordered a dish called "Zarape de Pato," which will go down in history as one of the most delectable dishes that has ever passed between these lips. It was made of tender, juicy, seasoned duck, shredded with spices and sandwiched between two soft corn tortillas and drenched over with a smooth, sweet, creamy puréed corn sauce. It was fantastic, sweet, spicy, smokey, and the duck was cooked as I've never seen it before--not chewy, not stringy, not tough, and not overly gamey. We left very full and very happy, and walked next to Rockefeller Square, where we had previously purchased tickets to go up to the "Top of the Rocks," at the top of the Rockefeller building. I need say not a thing--here are the photos:





Some of them are a little blurry, but I think it only adds to the charm.

You always here people describe the lights of New York City, the silver and neon, the sky that's never black, but it's another thing entirely to see it, and from above. Looking out over the city, with the golden September moon above me, I cannot say that I felt as though I were home. But I can say that this whole experience no longer felt like summer camp.

We walked about the city a little more after that and then caught a 10:30 train back to Bronxville. We were tired and our feet were thrashed, but we'd had a lovely time.

A Film/Food Dichotomy

On Friday, I had a rather curious experience regarding watching two very different films about food in one day. The first film I saw, while eating an enormous box of Whoppers and drinking a Coke, was Julie and Julia.

The film was entertaining, and it's portrayal of French cooking left one hungering for lobster, duck, and all other sorts of delicacies. However sick the enormous amount of sugar I had consumed had caused me to feel, I still went home craving Coq Au Vin.

Later in the evening, my bestie and I went to see a film with a far more cynical take on the occupation of eating:

This was certainly one of the best documentaries of the year, in my opinion. It did a good job of presenting facts and appealing to emotions without becoming too sensationalist. Overall, it truly made me rethink the food industry and my own buying habits.

I'm already a label-reader when it comes to every product I buy: food, cosmetics, dish soap, you name it. I have a certain "checklist" which I usually make sure the product meets before I buy it, including things like people-tested, organic, no parabens, no palm oil, etc. But before this movie, I had never really thought about corn and soybeans, and how those industries are mostly ruining our environment and our bodies.

Here's a list posted on the site for the film of 10 simple things you can do to change our food system:

1. Stop drinking soda and other sweetened beverages.

2. Eat at home instead of eating out.

3. Support the passage of laws requiring chain restaurants to post calorie information on menus and menu boards.

4. Tell schools to stop selling sodas, junk food, and sports drinks.

5. Meatless Mondays--Go without meat on day a weeks.

6. Buy organic or sustainable food with little or no pesticides.

7. Protect family farms; visit your local farmer's market.

8. Make a point to know where your food comes from--READ LABELS.

9. Tell Congress that food safety is important to you.

10. Demand job protection for farm workers and food processors, ensuring fair wages and other protections.

I hope that anyone out there who reads my blog (if there's anyone out there that reads my blog...) will make a point to see this documentary, learn more about the issues at hand, and make fair choices about the products they choose to consume. We are not helpless to the system!

Another Blogger's List

I found this via another blogger's site, and I thought I'd try it here. It's a list of one hundred foods every omnivore should try. Sorry, but I can't figure out how to make the blue go away. :(

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Italicize all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The Omnivore's 100

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche (If you count the ice cream...)
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat (I had it BBQ'd, not curried)
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

A New Intrigue...

I've always been a lover of tea and tea ritual from all over the world, and a new aspect of this culture has only yesterday come to my attention: Dim Sum. It's a dining experience I've enjoyed numerous time since Dynasty Gardens opened in my home town and became the only Chinese restaurant around to serve this style of lunch, comprised of small, finger-foodie usually steamed dishes to be served alongside traditional tea. This tea ritual, or yum cha, has provided the world many delicious, bite-sized delicacies, and I would like to talk now about one of them: sticky rice in lotus leaves, or lo mai gai. I experienced this treat for the first time yesterday, and it has fast become one of my favourite foods in the world. I saw its lovely picture on the dim sum menu and, automatically intrigued by any sort of food wrapped in leaves, I ordered it.

When it arrived, I carefully unwrapped the steaming package with my fork to reveal a serving of moist, fragrant rice, which I quickly began to devour. on reaching the center of the package, I met with a nice surprise--a nugget of sweet sausage and a pile of teeny-tiny shrimp! All of this amid a variety of rice so sweet, so earthy and herbal . . . it was almost too much!

I'm in the process of looking for an easy enough recipe to make this phenomenal dish at home, but so far, it looks like they are all going to require ingredients I cannot come by and excessive quantities of time which I cannot procure. Hopefully, I will be able to master this, now easily one of my most favourite foods of all time.

P.S. A Little Inspiration

Here's a video of the lead singer of Sigur Rós, Jónsi, and his boyfriend, Alex, preparing a delicious raw foodie treat. They have a cookbook--the link to the PDF is embedded below as well:

Jónsi & Alex Recipe Show - Macadamia Monster Mash from Jónsi & Alex on Vimeo.

Their cookbook, The Good Heart Cookbook, is located at http://jonsiandalex.com/media/recipebook/.

Enjoy their cuteness and good recipes! We sure have already!

Two Fantastic New Concoctions

Michael Benjamin spent most of the week here, and I am still swooning over the phenomenal chicken dish we concocted on his last evening here. We winged it, but here's an after-the-fact recipe with estimated quantities:

Pâtes avec Poulet, Poivron, et Vinaigrette

1 package angel hair pasta
1 boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut into little-ish pieces
1 coloured pepper cut into bite-sized strips
1 handful fresh cress
1/2 cup of chopped walnuts
1/2 cup feta cheese
1-1 1/2 cups vinaigrette
1 small clove garlic, minced

1. Boil pasta according to package directions.
2. Sautée chicken pieces, pepper pieces, and garlic with generous salt and lemon pepper, until beginning to carmelize.
3. At the Last minute, add 1/2 of the chopped cress and 1/4 cup of dressing to chicken mixture.
4. Toss pasta with dressing, rest of the cress, feta, chicken mixture, and walnuts.

Vinaigrette:

Mix together in a small bowl:
Juice and zest of one lemon
2-3 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar
1 clove garlic,, minced
2 tbsp. chopped, fresh flat-leaf parsley
1 tsp. honey
salt and pepper
1 scant cup of olive oil

With the leftovers of this dish, I created a new one this evening:

Deconstructed Tzatziki Salad

1 cucumber, chopped into bite-sized pieces
1 bunch of radishes, chopped
1 shallot, thinly sliced
1/2-3/4 cup Greek yoghurt
1 clove garlic, minced
2-4 tbsp. chopped herbs (mint, cilantro, parsley, and cilantro all taste nice)
1/2 tsp. honey
juice of one small lemon
pepper to taste

1. Toss together radishes, cucumber, and shallot.
2. Mix together remaining ingredients into a thick sauce and toss with veggies until lightly coated/
3. Serve with a sprinkling of chopped walnuts and chopped watercress on top.

Girl's Day Out

Yesterday found my best friend, Amina, and I in a flurry of beautiful things. We skipped our morning jog and, instead, dressed up to make a jam cake--which we ate out on the patio-- as well asvisit a few antique stores, make a stir-fry for lunch, and watch two absolutely terrible movies starring Jackson Rathbone: S. Darko, and Twilight. They were both awful, but we had a beautiful, lovely day.

Here are some pictures of our delicious jam cake, recipe from Gourmet magazine, December 2007, to follow.



Jam Crumb Cake

For Cake:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 3/4 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
3/4 stick butter, melted
1/2 milk
1 large egg
1/2 cup raspberry jam
For Crumb Topping:
3/4 stick butter, melted
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. salt
1 cup plus 2 tbsp. all-purpose flour

1. Preheat oven to 400°F with rack in the middle. Generously butter a 9-inch square or round cake pan.
2. Whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.
3. Whisk together butter, milk, and egg in a large bowl, then whisk in flour mixture until just combined.
3. Pour batter into cake pan. Dollop jam all over surface, then swirl into batter with a spoon.
4. In another bowl, whisk together butter, sugars, cinnamon, and salt until smooth. Stir in flour, then blend with your fingertips until incorporated.
5. Sprinkle crumbs in large clumps over top of cake.
6. Bake cake about 20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
7. Enjoy with a mild, fruity tea (we had a pomegranate green tea) or a smoky black.

The Soy Milk Experiment

Yesterday, Meredith came over and we tried something new--we made our own soy milk. I'll post the link to the recipe below, but I'll make my own comments on it, too.

http://www.ellenskitchen.com/faqs/tofumilk.html

It was a pretty entailed process, and the recipe didn't really warn us of all the chemical surprises, so let me fill you in.

First of all, you want to get two pots and a kettle of water all boiling at the same time, so that you don't waste time waiting for the water to heat up for the two blanchings and the rinsing. Also, when she mentions that you want to hold onto the blender lid, she's not kidding! Hold onto it with a kitchen towel, too, because if you blender leaks even an itsy bit, you will burn your hand. Then, when you strain out the okara, let the cheese cloth lie slack in bowl, and then once all of the milk is poured in, lift it straight up and out--we tried to hold the cheese cloth taut and lost most of the okara into the mix. Finally, in the last step, skip the salt (or at least reduce it) and don't be surprised when all six cups of milk boils down to almost nothing! We sort of panicked, but when we added six cups of water at the end, it tasted great. I guess you just have to concentrate that flavour.

There are some pictures of the project above!

Some Culinary Experiments:

I've done some neat things in the kitchen in the past few days. First of all, I've improved upon a recipe for "Apricot Tea Bread," as published by Sunset Cookbooks in 1993. Here is the new and improved SCONE recipe!

1 large egg
2 large egg whites
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter, room temp.
1 tbsp. orange zest (about 1 small orange)
1/4 cup orange juice
3/4 sour cream (I use low fat)
2 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
3 cups (about) dried fruit
1-4 cup slivered almonds

1. In a large bowl, combine eggs, sugar, butter and zest; beat until blended.

2. Stir in orange juice and sour cream.

3. In a small bowl, mix flour, baking powder and baking soda.

4. Add dry ingredients to egg mixture and beat to blend.
(Note: don't bother getting out the electric mixer--this is an easy one by hand)

5. Stir in fruit and nuts.
(Note: the original recipe calls for apricots and golden raisins, but I like a medley of fruits--on this batch I used both types of raisins, apricots, peaches, and apples)

6. Arrange 2-inch diameter lumps of batter on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper.

7. Bake in a 350° oven for about a half an hour, until medium brown. Makes about 20 scones.

8. Pairs great with as hearty tea--try an Irish or Scottish Breakfast or an Orange Spice like Constant Comment by Bigelow.