breakfast in

I don't make brunch myself very often. way too much effort than going out to a tasty little diner nearby. plus, if you try to make waffles or pancakes or something on your own, there is no single-serving recipe. you always make some batter but it ends up being enough for a BUNCH of people and then you have a ton of leftover batter or leftover waffles and it is sadness. within the last year, however, a few friends started doing a weekly brunch thing. one of us would host, alternating, and we'd make brunch for the group. sometimes potluck-style, sometimes the host doing everything. and THEN, one of the group moved to the netherlands for a year. and so we fell out of practice. and then she came back, but we were still out of practice.

well, a few weeks ago (almost a month at this point! oh my!) one of our own moved for good. Sarah headed to Ohio for grad school. gone for 5+ years. not cool, sarah. not cool. so we did one last brunch together. and i made biscuits and gravy, from a recipe that came in my tastingtable email, based on a recipe from Nate Appleman, Pulino's, New York. my first time ever making biscuits and sausage gravy. and it turned out really well! as in, crazy delicious. and fatty, i am not going to lie. though i think i might have gotten leaner sausage than i had wanted, because there wasnt much fat for the gravy, but it still worked well. and the polenta biscuits were a very nice consistency, i think i will repeat them in the future.

Pasta Summer

i dont make pasta very often. i think a few months went by, actually, during which i didnt make pasta at all. i dont really know why - maybe for some reason i think that boiling water takes too long, even though that is a bit of an absurd notion. or i'm just not in the mood. BUT a few times this summer, i had vegetables and cheese and nothing to do with them except for throw them over some delicious pasta. above is actually one of the most delicious pasta dishes i have ever made, and if i hadnt portioned it out bringing it to work, i would have eat the ENTIRE thing in 1 sitting because it was so incredibly good. what made it so good? fresh gnocchi (no, i didnt make it, i got it from wholefoods), tomatoes, mozzerella, and fresh basil pesto (now that one i DID make, with basil from my farmshare). it sounds so simple, but the combo of the gnocchi and the homemade pesto was just incredible.


pasta dish number 2? well, i had a party a few weeks back, and one of the things that i made was an eggplant dip - i roasted some eggplant (coated in a little bit of olive oil) and then chopped it up with some parsley and more olive oil into a little spread. well, i had some leftover, and so i threw it in with some pasta, more tomato, and more mozzerella. it was also quite tasty, though not as incredible as the gnocchi. ah well, not everything can be amazing.

a summer dinner party

pardon the terrible cell-phone picture. its the only one that had everything in it.

backstory: there was a weekend in july that the whole fam was going to be home, while brother and father played in a golf tournament. i decided to take advantage of the fact that they have a grill, and i dont, and so brother and i schemed to have a bbq one of the nights of the weekend. i looked through all my cooking magazines, and found some exciting recipes. so i stocked up at whole foods for everything on our list, grabbed my mandoline, and headed home for the weekend and a nice summer bbq.


first up? cilantro-lime slaw. it was actually rather good, and not as hot as i feared (or rather, as the fear instilled in me by mother, who pulled out rubber gloves for me to wear while chopping up the serrano chile that went into the recipe. i, of course, made wayyyy too much as i had a red cabbage from the farm share, and wanted green cabbage as well, but luckily the family was able to get through the leftovers easily.


next side? Israeli Couscous with Roasted Eggplant and Cinnamon-Cumin Dressing. also found in the bon appetit magazine. it was actually my first experience with israeli couscous, as i am much more familiar with...whatever normal (much smaller grain) couscous is. BUT it was a very favorable experience that i think i will need to repeat. the actual recipe...i am not as much a fan of. I think that maybe it needed some added salt, or SOMETHING else, but it was lacking the strong roasted flavor that i was hoping for (maybe too much oil cooled it off? maybe too much cilantro?) something to adjust in the future.


next side is one i didnt not actually make myself! this is a mango lime salsa that mary made! her recipe came from here. it is very tasty, and goes well with a lot of things. lots of lime. better with more ripe mangoes. as i have never used mangoes, i had no idea what goes into choosing one, so i selected one that was less than ripe :( bad jenn.


we also grilled some avocados (yummmmm), and i made 2 sauces for the pork and steak tips that we grilled. the pork itself got a nice rub. i cant remember exactly what i did this time, it was either garlic+salt+pepper, or it was paprika+cumin+garlic+salt. i think the second, but i vary my rubs all the time so. ANYWAY, the 2 sauces that i made? innnnnnncredible! first up, the Bourbon and Brown Sugar Barbecue Sauce. this required a lot of ingredients. some of which my mom actually already had (including liquid smoke, which shocked me). and it took quite some time to reduce to the correct consistency. but it was also incredible. like, so so good. and it improved upon re-heating. after using it at the bbq, i also used it the next week with some pulled pork i made in my crock pot. again, delicious. sauce #2 was a bit different, mostly because we had planned on doing some chicken on the grill as well. and so, i made a Red Curry Peanut Sauce. which was OMGSOGOOD. it went well on everything, and was so incredibly good. like, i want to make it ALL the time. i had some leftover the week after, and smothered some chicken with it, and it continued to be incedible on the leftovers-nights. highly highly recommended.

i am so lazy

wow, i really am incredibly behind on my posts. i was looking through all the pictures that i prepared and NEVER bothered to post, and i cant believe it has been so long. a fact that actually segways quite nicely into the theme for this entry. my laziness.

i once bought some bananas. and i was too lazy to actually eat them before they got very brown. in my defence, i really prefer bananas that are sort of green still, nice and firm, and have that green taste to them. so, once the bananas were no longer green, i didnt really want to eat them anymore, so naturally they then became brown shortly after without my intervention.

you would think, at this point, that i would have trashed the bananas that i was too lazy to eat. but no. i called my mother and got her banana bread recipe and made 2 loaves of banana bread. which is delicious. too lazy to eat the bananas while they were fresh, but not too lazy to make banana bread? that is how my brain works.

and so we come to july. when i made the baby quiches in the previous post, i had some leftover egg yolks. which i didnt want to waste even though work was really busy. so i tried to find some easy recipe on epicurious that would use them up, like a dessert or something. instead, i was intrigued by a recipe for ravioli. because ravioli pasta dough requires a bunch of egg yolks. and so, i went to the trouble of making pasta dough, from scratch (from this recipe), and then rolling it out because i DONT OWN A PASTA ROLLER (thanks mother, for promising that you would get me the kitchenaid attachment for christmas so that i wouldnt buy it for myself, and then NOT ACTUALLY DOING IT). i then cut it up with a biscuit cutter, because also unlike my mother, i dont have a ravioli mold.


i mixed together the cheese mixture from the recipe above, except instead of parmesan, i used gorgonzola (it was what i had on hand. either that or i purchased it intentionally at the store. i dont really remember). and, naturally, i made WAY too much filling. even though it was the amount that the recipe called for, i had like, 2 cups leftover. what does one DO with all of that leftover gorgonzola ricotta mixture? one throws it into a pyrex dish along with a bunch of cherry tomatoes, and bakes it for a bit, for an additional delicious side.


laziness can be good, see. it produces homemade ricotta gorgonzola ravioli.

little baby quiche!

wow, i am SO behind on my posts. i started the draft of this post in june. maybe early july*. at that point, i had made them weeks ago, taken the pictures, even uploaded them to my computer, but had been toooooo busy with work to post things. and then things at work also got incredibly busy, and i never posted, and oh my god i have an incredible backlog of photos right now that i will probably start posting soon with little text. but pretty pictures!

these were made for jessie's bridal shower. i got up at 7am or so, and did some hardcore work through til about noon, then i got these suckers going, threw them in the oven, hopped in the shower, ran out of the shower in the middle of shampooing my hair to check on them, then back into the shower...yeah, it was a hectic morning. BUT i got them out of the oven with enough time to get to the shower on time. ish.



*it appears that this post has back-dated to when i initiated the draft! it has been a whole month in the works! depressing! but i like to pretend that it wasnt mid-august when i actually got around to posting this...

a delicious blueberry dish

so, i've been getting a bunch of blueberries in my farmshare. love them, but what do i do with them all? and of course, i had an actual reason to cook them! because a coworker (who is a fantastic cook herself) is in the process of remodeling her new (new to her, quite old to the world) farmhouse, and got the renovations to a point where she could have a house party. and so i needed to bring something! and needed to find a good blueberry recipe! initially, i was thinking of just doing a blueberry bread, and just adapting my bananabread recipe (which, come to think of it, i might do this week since i bought more blueberries at the market as they were on sale!)

it just so happened that this past week i came across a lovely food blog, smitten kitchen, with all kinds of lovely recipes. perhaps some day my blog will be a bit more like that, when i am creating my own recipes more than just using other recipes posted online or in books. in any event, i saw this blueberry crumb bar recipe, and they looked so incredibly delicious, i had to make them!


i was rather surprised at the way the bars are made, with the blueberries all in one layer. i would have expected it to be too juicy that way, but perhaps the cornstarch made up for that and helped to bake it into a thicker jammy layer.


i did make one slight alteration to the recipe. and that was that i waited to add the egg to the dough until after i had incorporated the butter. yes yes i know that isnt really an alteration, i am sure that is how miss smittenkitchen did it as well, because that is generally how all flaky butter-based doughs are made (dry ingredients --> butter --> wet ingredients). i think my butter might not have been cold enough, because it is so freakin hot in my apartment right now, so that probably also contributed to my dough being just a bit more wet and together. it really came together, which was nice for the bottom layer of the dough, but a bit too-together for the top - i think that it should have been more crumbly.



on the whole, they were very delicious, and nice and cakey. the lemon gave it a very nice touch, unsurprisingly, considering how well blueberries and lemons go together. and while they went pretty quick since i brought them to a party, and thus didnt have a chance to test the storing-in-the-fridge thing, i think that would make them even better. i wonder if they might be better with a more crumbly top in general though. i think that using the same topping as the bottom layer detracts a bit. i am remembering back to the blueberry muffins my mother used to make, with a sugary crumbly topping. am thinking i might try a bread more similar to that this weekend, with a sugary crumbly topping. hmmmm...

boring food

I fear i have been cooking a lot of boring food lately. sort of a "same old same old." i think that is one of the downers about the farmshare. while i am loving getting a box of random vegetables each week, and supporting local agriculture...it can be quite frustrating if I get an assortment i am not particularly interested in, OR if i get a really exciting assortment during a week that is particularly busy for me when i wont have much time to cook, so things might spoil before i have the time to do something interesting with them. like in the picture above. i was so super excited to get cabbage. maybe i could have done a slaw, OR what i wanted to do was cook it with beef and other vegetables and make little cabbage wraps - it sounded very exciting. unfortunately, i didnt have time, so boring sauteed cabbage it was. and the kale that i got! i love kale, always looking for new things to do with it. but it was starting to wilt because time gets away from me, and the potatoes were going to get bad too, so i boiled those and roasted some chickpeas to be something interesting. and then the beets, which i also love - the beet greens were still attached, and i wanted to do something exciting like risotto or pasta or something, but no time so i roasted and did a salad with feta. all of this quite tasty, but boring!!


another week, another pile of vegetables that i have no clue what to do with and need to cook mostly in one night because its the only time i have free. first up: tons of cherry tomatoes. actually, technically, i think they are grape tomatoes. yum, but i dont eat enough salads at home, so what am i to do with them? perhaps in a cold pasta salad? yum. initially, i was going to put other vegetables in the salad as well - like cucumber and maybe zucchini...but alas, they went bad too quickly. it kills me that i am wasting vegetables some weeks. also needed to use up some swiss chard (i have found that if i smother it in butter, it tastes much better) and onion, and turnips! so what did i do with the turnips? boiled, then fried up like french fries! delicious! but probably incredibly unhealthy and not worth all that oil. i need to figure out a way to get them a crisp up a bit better. man, i really wish i had a deep-fryer sometimes. though at the same time i KNOW what a bad idea that would be.

i feel like a grown up

so its been a rough few weeks at work. deadline after deadline, working late, and just a generally boring subject matter to my project work, so its been a little blah lately. so when amy and i realized it had been a while since we had really hung out, and she has also had quite the busy time at work lately, we decided that we were getting together on thursday night and having a little girls night, and watching some GLEE and drinking some wine. i bought some chicken wednesday night, and found a recipe online, and got the chicken marinating. that way, thursday night all i would have to do is put the chicken in the oven, rice in the rice maker, and throw some tsatsiki together, and voila! dinner! THIS must be how real adults do it!


the flaw, in this plan, however, is that 1. i had to work late thursday night. like, too late to get together with Amy. bah. the other flaw in the plan is that even though tuesday afternoon, when i played with my netflix queue and put GLEE first because it was available "now" ... by wednesday morning, when they were actually shipping my dvds, GLEE went to "long wait" and i got the next movies on my queue instead. um, so unfair!! so maybe we do this friday night, right? that will work perfectly, right? except it was alexandra's birthday, and we all wanted to go out drinking after such a long week, and so we headed to kerry's apartment to meet elin, and do some drinking before going out. so by the time i got to cook the chicken, it was saturday evening, but miraculously it was still good! and delicious roasted over some onions, with rice and tsatsiki.


tonight, i went with an old classic: angel hair pasta, with asparagus, secret sauce, and parmesan cheese. very much lacking, however, because i didnt have time to get proscuitto. still tasty, and we can pretend it is healthy.

it feels like summer now

so a week ago, the weather was BEAUTIFUL, and the lovely three-day memorial weekend was about to begin, and so i stopped off at whole foods on my way home from work to start the weekend on a good note. and i filled my cart up with delicious delicious fruits. and then i saw corn, and it looked so so good and was 3 ears for $1. 3 ears. $1. absurd, right? so i bought some. and then i went over to the meat counter, because i wanted to try this lamb recipe i found a few weeks ago. but they didnt have the cut i wanted, and so instead....i decided to get some pork, to make pulled pork! again, a first for me. but it was JUST PERFECT for throwing in the slow cooker saturday morning before going out for the day. throw that together with my cucumber and tomatoes from the farm share, and we have a perfect summer meal!

the corn...was probably the best corn i have had in a long time. didnt need butter, didnt need salt, it was just fresh goodness. i think it is going to be a corn summer for me, it is so simple. reminds me of my first weekend in sydney, 3 years ago (man that was so long ago!) when we went down to bondi beach, and there was a little festival going on, and they were selling corn on the cob on a stick. amazing. and did you know that blue ribbon sells bbq sauce? it does! which is quite tasty when you make pulled pork with it. not as good as stamey's though. sometimes i want to go visit my uncle and grandma down south, JUST so i can get some stamey's. yum! i topped this meal off with some white sangria - apple and watermelon and white cran peach and white wine and yum yum yum.

i can make cheese now. is there anything i cant do? ((yes))

A few weeks ago, i managed to get in off the waitlist for a goat cheese making class at the Natick Community Organic Farm. was so excited that someone dropped out of the class so that i could get a spot!! at the class, i got a little starter kit, so i decided to try to make my own goat cheese that very weekend! the family was in town for cathy's graduation, so i thought it would be a good little take-home gift. i picked up some goats milk at whole foods on my way home, and got things going. this recipe is so simple, i will probably make this somewhat often. you start with a gallon of milk, and heat it to 86 degrees. then add the starter. turn off the heat. take a picture. put the lid on. let sit. i started it around 11pm, maybe midnight. checked on it before leaving for work, and it looked pretty good, but i wanted to let it sit longer. i ended up getting home around 4:30 (it was a friday) and was able to begin step 2:


look at that amazing separation of the curds from the whey! so freakin awesome. so i scooped out all of the curds, and discarded the whey. apparently, you can drink the whey, or make whey-bread, or whatever you want, because it is all protein, no fat, and good for you. so...if you want some whey, i will save it the next time i make goat cheese, if you ask nicely.


so i ladled all of those lovely curds into cheese cloth. except this is not cheese cloth. it is butter muslin, which is much more fine, and allows you to make soft cheeses like chevre, soft goat cheese, fresh white cheese, etc. and so the cheese curds started chillin in the butter muslin in a collander...


you can let the cheese drain for a variable amount of time. i decided to do it for the rest of the day, and actually overnight as well, so that the cheese would be a really thick consistency. maybe i will try it really soft sometime, but i really prefer it to be thicker, and this actually came out an amazing consistency


the next morning, it was ready to be rolled into chevre logs, and spread on to pieces of bread, with a little drizzle of balsalmic vinegar. oh my god so good! yum yum yum. after that success, i decided to buy some kits so that i could make it again. and also so that i can make mozzerella and ricotta! SO excited to try making mozzerella soon!

so i threw a dessert party

so, months ago at this point, on my birthday, we were out at the peoples republik, enjoying some tasty cocktails, and talking about how much we like dessert. and making dessert. and wouldnt it be fun if we had a party where everyone made some dessert and brought some and enjoyed it all? so we pulled out our blackberries and looked for the right weekend to do it. settled on one, and i put it in my calendar, and then a few weeks later i sent out invites and we had ourselves a dessert party! i, of course, had to bake a whole bunch of stuff in case no one brought anything. and also because i wanted to use up some ingredients i had lying around. so the first thing i made is this apple molasses cake that sarah hopp gave me the recipe to. spicy and delicious, though it drives me crazy when you cant get a cake out of its pan completely. i think maybe next time i will use parchment paper so that the top is perfect, just have to hope that the caramel doesnt run under it.


after the cake was squared away, i opened up my martha stewart cookie cookbook, and looked for something tasty. and i wanted something chocolate. and so...chocolate peanut butter brownies! this picture is horribly out of focus, but its the only one i took of them. and they were deliciousssssssssss. i dont think you can go wrong with chocolate and peanut butter. i am thinking of making them again tonight, actually.


and then i had to pick a 3rd thing out of the martha stewart cookie cookbook. and i had some figs leftover from when i made the fig sauce for the duck breast from months earlier. so here comes the fig pinwheel cookies. which were obnoxious as hell to make. i dont know if it was because the weather was warm and so the dough was melting too quickly, or what, but even with chilling, it was impossible to work with. so i probably wont make these too often. but they were fairly decent.

party was a total success. allison brought red velvet cupcakes. erin did these amazing brownie-cookie-dough things. malima made cookies. jay made a carrot cake - complete with little orange/green carrots decorating the top. there may have been other things, but that is everything i can remember.

fiddle-le-dee fiddle-le-doo fiddleheads!

Oh fiddleheads. I had absolutely NO idea what these were when they arrived in my CSA share. because they look quite weird. and man they are a bitch to clean. but Jen, from work, who recently also joined the farmshare, shared her recommendation for how to cook them with me, and i did a little bit of googling, and made this delicious pasta dish with sauteed fiddleheads and tomatoes. yum. fiddleheads are one of my new favorite vegetables. one of many different vegetables i have happily been introduced to since joining my farmshare. beets, celeriac, parsnips, fiddleheads...the delicious list goes on.


the second time i got them, i also got english peas. which you have to shell yourself. which was actually remarkably fun. tedious, sure, but fun. i like peas. did a similar thing with the fiddleheads (blanche, saute with tomatoes, repeat) and it was...boring. i think i overcooked them, the peas were undercooked, i hate stew-like tomatoes, and i put too much oil in. blah. plus, i cant quite figure out what type of starch/grain this dish would go well with. its not right with pasta. potatoes maybe, but i think they would be too thick. couscous too thin. rice maybe but it might be too much. bah. conundrum. now that i think about it more, potatoes might be the best bet. would probably be tasty with them mashed, and might even go nicely with roasted potatoes. next time?


the most recent time, i yet again blanched and then sauteed. this time i chopped up an onion and sauteed that first, then added the fiddleheads and some chicken broth and white wine, and threw chicken that i had fried in, and let it cook up nicely for maybe 20 minutes. yum. i felt so accomplished after, like i had cooked a real meal like a real person. i also made some carrots on the side. and quite possibly burned them because i was doing my dishes as they cooked. oops. but still a real meal! with a main course and a side and everything! i feel so grown up....

i dont even REMEMBER cooking some of this stuff

well i have had QUITE the hiatus from actually writing about the food i have been cooking. have still been cooking, and taking pictures of food, but all of those pictures have remained on my camera. because i am lame, and lazy, and have been overworked. so, let me catch up on the posts, and maybe get on a regular schedule.


i think i blocked this out of my memory. because it was...not that great. i really dont know why i made this, i think i just needed to use up some supplies. i had some good bread that was going to go bad, and swiss chard that i didnt know what to do with, and so i made this egg dish, the name of which i am completely forgetting right now (strata maybe?). and i put blue cheese and kalamata olives in it. and it was weird. it was tasty, mostly, but weird. i dont think i'll be making it again. but that might be because i hate swiss chard.


i was so proud of this meal, alothough it looks so ugly on the plate. i bought some lamb, and made a spice rub, and then broiled it. and it was delicious. my first time making lamb steaks. actually might have been my first time making lamb at home. and of course, as i always do with lamb (so often, right) i made a little tsatsiki sauce. yum. but i think the best part of the meal was the beet salad. my CSA finally gave me bunched beets! which means i finally had beet greens! and i found this delicious little salad recipe - roast the beets, and saute the beet greens, and then do a dijon vinaigrette...holy crap it is delicious!! i have made it a few times since then. delicious.


this was my brightly colored vegetables dinner. used up some of my carrots from the CSA, some potatoes, green beans with radishes, and boring chicken. for the potatoes, i attempted to make french fries without frying them. if i am remembering correctly, i cut them up, boiled them, and then baked them in a little bit of oil. they were....boring. just boring. i think next time, i will sacrifice the calories and fry them up. too much effort for boring fries! i also learned that...i hate radishes. like, really hate them. what the hell do you do with radishes? i mean, they are not tasty at all. even with green beans and a dijon vinaigrette. blech. glad i only got them for 2 weeks in the CSA, hope that they dont come back.


oh yum. i needed to use up some of my vegetables from my CSA, and so i chopped up some eggplant, yellow squash, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes, and roasted them up into deliciousness. threw it on top of some penne pasta, which i made a simple cream+goat cheese sauce for. it was...boring. i need to get better at making random sauces. the vegetables were delicious, but the sauce was really lacking something. and i had so much of this leftover! will i never learn?

i am not alone in my cake love!

i know, i generally dont post pictures that have people in them. but i thought that this picture of my aunt with the birthday cake she made me was just so stunningly beautiful i couldn't NOT include her in it. since easter fell right in between my sister and my birthdays this year, easter dessert was a birthday cake for us. a sponge cake, to be exact, using my grandma's recipe and my grandma's pans and gigantic plate. another reason my aunt is in the picture: so that you can see just how gigantic this cake is. aunt joanie is not a tiny person - we're about the same size, i'd say. and this cake is wider than her hips. its a bit absurd. it also has pudding and strawberries between the layers, and whipped cream on top - she had to start cutting it almost immediately after putting the whipped cream on, because the cake started to slide. yes, slide. it was a bit like the leaning tower(/cake!) of pisa...except that its lean kept leaning more and more!

but, a birthday cake on easter? that doesnt seem like the correct dessert, you say! well, my sister had you covered:


mother and sister are HUGE coconut cake fans. and apparently, easter is a good time for coconut cake, because it means you can make a bunny cake. oh how cute, you say? NO, IT IS NOT CUTE WHEN YOU DONT LIKE COCONUT AND ITS YOUR BIRTHDAY.

when i was 3 years old, my birthday fell on the day before easter. so my mother made me a coconut bunny cake, very similar to the one above. i believe we still have the pictures of it. i hate coconut. my mother knew i hated coconut. but noooo, jenn doesnt get to have a barbie dress cake, no no no. jenn gets to have a GROSS COCONUT BUNNY CAKE because thats what mom likes. my childhood was incredibly deprived, i know.

so this year, mother wanted to make a coconut cake, so she made the cake (and the frosting, AND bought a fresh coconut and grated/shaved it, which, let me tell you, takes a LOT of work) and my sister decorated the bunny with jelly beans and twizzlers. and it was adorable. i am told it tasted really good too. i ate matzoh crack instead, as my hatred for coconut has only intensified over the years.

i leave you with this image of the sliding, gigantic sponge cake. may your days be filled with gigantic leaning towers of sponge cake as well:

i know why i stopped updating

its because i cooked so damned much easter weekend that the thought of having to make 3 different posts to cover all the pretty food was just too much for me! never fear, i am back. why? because my CSA is making me so freakin happy right now that i HAVE to post pictures of some of the awesome food i have been making. did you know i got fiddleheads last week? and bunched beets? holy crap that was exciting! but that is for another post (particularly since those pictures are still on my camera at home right now). If you don't belong to a CSA, I highly recommend you join - so far i have convinced my friends emily and bryan to join my farm, as well as my coworker jen, and so far everyone has been really happy about it (as has sarah, who suggested enterprise farms in the first place to me!)

so right now i want to talk about appetizers. appetizers are something i generally struggle with - figuring out what type to make, getting the right balance of tasty but not too filling, with enough variety, and then, of course, having the actual TIME to make them so that they are the right temperature at serving during appetizer time, which, lets face it, is when i am frantically trying to finish cooking those last-minute food items.

easter weekend, the whole [immediate] family was in town - and by that, i mean my sister, my brother, his girlfriend mary, and i were all home, and aunt joan and uncle bill were around. so saturday night, we had AJ and UB over for dinner, and i thought it would be nice to make some appetizers. this of course annoyed my mother to no end, because it meant i was in her way in her kitchen, and filling peoples stomaches, but oh well.


appetizer #1: puff pastry. i HAD to do *something* with puff pastry, it is the king of appetizers. but i didnt want anything too filling, and obviously needed to be savory instead of sweet. i settled with the simple puff pastry hearts and flowers with parmesan cheese on top. except i cheated and used pecorino, because that is what my parents have in a giant wheel from italy. i'm really not kidding about the giant wheel. not bad, but i feel like puff pastry is better for dessert things.


Appetizers #2 & #3: stuffed olives. super simple, but nice flavor. here, i stuffed green olives with blue cheese. yum. nice thing: you can do these way in advance. next to them is another thing that was fun, though i probably should have salted and olive oiled them. it is mini mozzerella balls, wrapped with basil and roasted red pepper. really good flavor combination (but again, the mozzerella needed salt, and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil wouldnt have hurt)


appetizers #4: this was really yummy. baguette, with a slice of green apple (which i had to slice without my mandoline! so sad!), a slice of brie, and walnuts. really good flavor combination on this as well. i think maybe i could have done a honey drizzle, but not really necessary.

end result: the appetizers were really tasty. and we stuffed ourselves on them. but i feel like they were lacking something. i think i need to step it up a bit next time. that, and actually plan in advance instead of thinking of ideas right before running to the store.

baking just to bake

so i finally got some barley flour in my CSA. this was super exciting, as i got barley (grains) twice, and wanted to make barley bread, so i tried to grind them into a flour, but failed at it horribly. luckily, my CSA read my mind, and sent along some barley flour a few weeks later. AND they gave a recipe idea! cranberry sour cream cake/bread with barley flour!


do you know how hard it is to find cranberries this time of year? my recipe called for cranberries in a can. where does one find those? or, you could use cranberry relish. okay....well, i couldnt find canned cranberries. so i figured, maybe there would be frozen cranberries i could throw in! i found frozen strawberries. and frozen raspberries. and frozen blackberries. and freakin FROZEN CANTALOUPE. but NO frozen cranberries! what the hell, supermarket. what the hell. all i could find was cranberry sauce. so i bought a can of cranberry sauce with whole berries in it. not quite the consistency i was looking for. it worked, but it still wasnt right. i made the cake in a bundt pan...and how annoying are those! they NEVER come out perfectly. even if you grease the pan. even if there is a ton of butter in the topping. it ALWAYS annoyingly sticks to the pan. hate hate hate. maybe i will buy a nonstick bundt pan one of these days, instead of using my aunt's old non-non-stick one.


also on the dessert front...i introduce to you: matzoh crack. this is...one of the tastiest treats there is. and there are only 4 ingredients: butter, brown sugar, chocolate, and matzoh. the first time that i made it (AKA, a week ago) i followed the recipe. i grabbed my large pan, and spread 5 pieces of matzoh out, made the toffee, and poured it on top. it looked a bit thin, and i really had to spread the toffee out to make sure all the matzoh got covered. first sign that i should have done something different. threw it in the oven, pulled it out at the right time...second sign: it was a bit burnt. now yes, i know, its caramel toffee...of COURSE its burnt, that is the entire point. but there are levels of burnt-ness. and while this was still edible-burnt, it was still burnt. i covered the top in chocolate chips, let them melt, spread across, threw in the freezer, and voila, when i pulled it out and pulled it off the parchment paper, it was a delicious treat all broken up.

i felt like the recipe could use a little alteration, however, based on the incredible version my coworker donna made. so 2 days later, while home in NY, i went to the grocery store and picked up my 4 ingredients. this time, i used a smaller pan. and only 3.5 pieces of matzoh. and 1.5X the amount of toffee. which i knew was the correct amount when i poured it on top and it completely covered the matzoh in a lovely, thick coating. after cooking (didnt burn this time!) i once again coated in chocolate (miiiight have been too thick this time) and put some slivered almonds on top. this was all lovely, EXCEPT for the fact that mom doesnt own parchment paper. so i used wax paper. NOT the same thing! the toffee stuck to the wax paper. really badly. so that i was peeling off tiny pieces. so depressing. perhaps 3rd time will be the charm.