This video is lovely. And I happen to have about 2 cups of beets in the fridge. I’m just not sure I have anyone nearby who would be willing to try my beet cake…
beet cake from tiger in a jar on Vimeo.
Category Archives: Other
OC Fair: “Let’s Eat!”
Last week, Brian and I took a trip to visit my family in California for a West Coast wedding reception. As one of the guests of honor, I didn’t take any pictures but it was a lovely event with delicious food. My mom and my sister made an amazing antipasto spread including marinated mushrooms, roasted peppers, ciliegine mozzarella, olives, salami, and roasted tomato goat cheese crostini. There was also lasagna, chicken parm, garlic bread, and the top secret family salad recipe, but I don’t want to make you too hungry without any pictures to back it up!
Although I was only in California for about two days, I managed to make a stop at the Orange County Fair. I grew up going to this fair and although the highlights used to include the rides, shopping, the hypnotist, and the concerts, this year we only had a few hours to focus on what was really important- the food! This year’s theme was “Let’s Eat!” so we did.
There is at least one new fried food item served each year. This year two of the hot new items were deep fried kool-aid balls and the artery-clogging gag-inducing deep fried stick of butter. I didn’t personally witness anyone eating this marvel of a food item, but I heard it tasted a bit like a churro.
Brian and I watched a food-on-a-stick contest and indulged in such delicious treats as Australian battered potatoes, a giant sausage with peppers and onions, frozen lemonade, tacos al pastor, and my favorite item of all, the deep fried Klondike bar. Brian and I shared this deep fried delight which was coated in a crisp hot batter and filled with a cool creamy not-yet-melted ice cream center.
After our brief California visit, we drove out to my parents house in Lake Havasu City, AZ where more food was enjoyed along with boating, water skiing, tubing, and other fun. But more on that later…
Summer Squash Ideas
It’s definitely summer squash season. It is only my second week of Boston Organics deliveries and I can already tell I need to get more creative with the stuff…
Usually I roast thinly sliced zucchini or summer squash in the oven until it’s crispy and we eat it as a side dish with a little chili garlic sauce or toss it in some pasta. This can be challenging though because the line between crisp and burnt is pretty fine. I’d like to find a recipe or a method that yields something not too mushy (for Brian), not too unhealthy (for me) and a bit more foolproof overall. Right now I’m looking at Saveur’s Marinated Zucchini recipe and these oven chips as potential contenders.
What’s your favorite way to prepare summer squash?
Posted in Other
SK Tomatoes
Smitten Kitchen’s Slow Roasted Tomatoes are so delicious! Maybe you should make them.
Posted in Other
24-by-24
This is a list of things I want to do by my next birthday. (That gives me 9 months.) It was inspired by Beantown Baker’s 30-by-30 list. It is mostly food-oriented because I’ve been feeling a bit limited in my cooking lately due to the fact that I’ve been on Weight Watchers since February. I actually love the program and I’ve lost over 20 pounds, but when I get it in my head that I want to bake a big fat cheesecake or make mayonnaise from scratch, I hold myself back. Self-control is good, but man oh man do I want to experiment in the kitchen these days!! Hence, a food-driven list.
Cooking
- Make at least 3 new kinds of popsicles in my Zuko
- Make breads from scratch: challah, ciabatta, bagels
- Make creme brulee from scratch
- Make mayonnaise from scratch
- Make key lime pie from scratch
- Make a loaded cheesecake from scratch (with candy of some sort- PB cups?)
- Make veggie paella from scratch (and finally use my saffron)
- Make at least 3 kinds of macarons from scratch
- Learn how to hard boil and soft boil eggs perfectly
- Make Christmas cookies to swap this year
- Keep buying lots of fresh fruit and vegetables
Relationships
- Finish all wedding thank you notes
- Send birthday cards to family members on birthdays/holidays
- Attend at least three foodie/blogger/Yelp/Meet-Up events
- Find a special way to make this first year of marriage totally awesome!
Health/Beauty
- Run a 5k
- Lose 25 pounds
- Figure out how to embrace my naturally wavy hair so that it looks nice day-to-day
Miscellaneous
- Go Camping
- Go Kayaking
- Go to at least 3 festivals
- Try for all A’s my first semester of grad school
- Take lots of pictures
- Combine all of my blogs. (I have been so unhappy with my blog set-up for so long that I stopped posting. I need to fix this issue!)
Posted in Other
My Favorite Cooking Apps
If you are the owner of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, this post is for you! I originally set out to tell you all about my favorite smart phone apps, but it turns out that my three favorites are only available for Apple products at this time. I hope they will create versions of these fun culinary apps for all of you other smart phone users in the future…
While I do savor a good cookbook, farmers markets and food blogs give me the greatest cooking inspiration. These things evolve with the seasons and guarantee fresh ideas at a great price. But sometimes, I just don’t have the inspiration or the knowledge to pull off something new and interesting. For those days I look to the incredibly amazing database that is the internet. An application is especially good because I can find a great recipe anywhere, like on my way to the grocery store, for example.
Here are my top three applications for dinner inpirations:
1. Epicurious Recipes & Shopping List App: currently available for iPhone and iPad, Free
The Epicurious app is great because not only can you do a regular keyword search, but you can search for recipes with all kinds of great categories like ingredient, type of cuisine, and season. There are also sponsored sections on the app’s home page that highlight great seasonal ideas and have sections for different skill levels. The most convenient part about this cool versatile app is that you can create a shopping list for your recipes which is divided up by the sections in the grocery store (dairy, produce, etc.). You may recognize the recipe above from my most recent post. And you can bet I made use of the shopping list and suggestions in the reviews as I was wandering through the store.
2. All Recipes Dinner Spinner: currently available for iPhone, Free
This is the application I suggest to friends who are less culinarily inclined, but it’s great for anyone. It’s perfect for those times when you have the same old ingredients in the fridge, but you’re not sure how you want to use them. With the dinner spinner, you select a type of dish, an ingredient, and the amount of time you want to spend cooking and you get a great list of recipes that fit your needs. The combination above returned 72 matches and there are tons more combinations you can try. The most fun and silly feature of this app is that you can spin the dinner spinner with just a flick of the wrist. I love that it utilizes that iPhone technology. (You can also spin it by touching the ‘Spin Categories’ button, if you’re so inclined.)
3. Ratio App: currently available for iPhone and iPod Touch, $4.99
This is actually the only app I have ever paid for on my iPhone. That’s how awesome I think it is. I also have Michael Ruhlman’s cookbook, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, but I wanted the app too. This book and app could revolutionize the way you cook, if you let them. Ruhlman advocates for the kind of cooking that ditches recipes because behind every recipe is a ratio that, once understood, can be adapted to cook pretty much anything. I chose to include a picture of the ratio for cookies because they are the first thing I made using this technique. The app has tabs that not only give you the ratio, but details on how to assemble and adapt it and a calculator so that you can use any kind of measurement that makes you comfortable (cups, pounds, grams). This is truly one awesome and educational app.