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Another Change, and Two Summer Shortcakes
Chocoholic Resource: ChocolateZoom.com
For the second time in two weeks I'm going to make a change to what I do on the blog. Last week I joined the editorial staff at Saveur, so to keep up with the blog while my life gets totally hectic (and not use any ideas that I might decide I want to use for work), I'm going to be changing the focus a little and writing more about my attempts to handle the stresses of cooking, keeping up the apartment and (occasionally) being a decent hostess while handling a job that will often keep me busy not just all day but all evening too.
But this doesn't mean I'm going to stop cooking! So for the first installment of the "new" blog entrees, a few notes about what I learned over the past couple weeks about making shortcakes. I tried two of the shortcake recipes from last month's magazines: the Two-Berry Shortcakes from Gourmet (in the picture) and the Peach and Blackberry Shortcakes with Blackberry Cream from Bon Appétit. The two recipes were very different - the first was billed as a "quick" recipe and was by far the faster of the two. The biscuits were easy to make and plop down on to the pan, whereas the biscuits for the second recipe required me to roll out a very sticky dough and cut out rounds. The extra work created a different kind of biscuit, nice and crunchy on the top in a way that reminded me of the top of a very good muffin, but, frankly wasn't so good that I'd do the extra work again. The second recipe also included a very time consuming blackberry cream (blackberries pureed with sugar and pushed through a sieve then whipped with cream) which, again, created a wonderful result, but was a little too much work to think about doing again. Next time maybe I can find some blackberry syrup, liqueur or jelly (or just stick with Gourmet's version and change the fruit).
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Today I spent a good part of my early afternoon in the muggy heat, foraging for overpriced produce at the Greenmarket. Something about Celia Barbour's new column for the NY Times food section, Bringing it Home, had guilted me into thinking that I wasn't spending enough time buying local, seasonal foods. Unfortunately the strawberries I bought were sour, the peaches were hard, and I couldn't find any of the fava beans she raved about (pictured above). So when I got home and got this in my email, I was thoroughly pleased. Hope you enjoy it too.
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Thanks to Rebecca for pointing me at ChocolateZoom.com, the online magazine that promises to be "the premier chocolate guide for New York City." The site culls chocolate-related articles from all over the web, offers chocolate recipes, reviews restaurants (focusing on their chocolate offerings, of course) and books, features a chocolate tour of NYC, and offers in-house articles on our favorite subject - chocolate. They also promise to help readers find their favorite chocolate items and the best places to indulge in each neighborhood. I like what they've got up so far, though I did find the site just a bit tricky to navigate: there are categories and article names listed in the same column in exactly the same font, so until you figure out that the top line is the category and the line directly under it is the most recent article, you feel a little lost. Now if only I had the time and the resources to explore all the chocolate treasures they write about....
Posted by georgia at 02:35 PM | Comments (0) | permalink | TrackBack | Email this post
There's a little piece of your childhood hiding on the On Your Feet site; it's comfy, it's colorful - it's jelly shoes... JELLY SHOES! Those fantastic plastic slippers that were so surprisingly comfortable and made you feel like a princess are back, and in adult sizes (and at $15, they're totally affordable!) I don't know about you, but I think these are going to be so much cooler this summer than the now over-hyped vans that every New Yorker is wearing these days. And hey, they're definitely prettier too!
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Buster about a year ago - soooooo cute!
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So it appears that last week there was a lively conversation on Lifehacker about the problem of cooking for two - the leftovers, the spoilage, the best ways to measure ingredients, etc. My solution has always just been to use recipes that yield four servings and take the leftovers to work for lunch, saving the cost of buying lunches that wouldn't be as good anyway. While some of the suggestions are a little too complicated for me (buying a vacuum sealer or a food scale would just complicate my life) the conversation is interesting with lots of good advice, and you can read it here. Now if I can just figure out how to make smaller ammounts of desserts...
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A while back Martha Stewart Living had a little piece where they made an apron out of a dishtowel (it may have been in "Good Things" and it's possible it was quite a few months ago, if not a couple years). I was totally uninspired by the idea, but when I saw this adorable dishtowel I remembered the idea instantly. It was much too cute to use as a dishtowel, so I decided to add ribbon to it. It'll be a perfect cheerful thing to cook in, and if I'm strategic about it I bet I can use it as lingerie too!
Posted by georgia at 11:13 PM | Comments (4) | permalink | TrackBack | Email this post
Just came across this link on Noodlepie. A mouthwatering visual encyclopedia of Vietnamese noodle dishes. Yum!
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A couple weeks ago, we headed up to Boston for our annual Fall Foliage Weekend with my guy Josh's parents. Alas, with the long summer heat lasting so far into the usual beginning of Fall, most of the leaves in New England were still vibrantly green or just barely beginning to turn. So to salvage our weekend, we turned to another idea: a cheese tour. Inspired by the NY Times article "Autumn in the Country; In a Land of Leaves, Seeking Cheese," we abandoned our usual Boston drives for a more adventurous trip touring dairies in Vermont.
We started Sat. afternoon and drove West, stopping at Nashoba Valley Winery, an apple orchard that produces fruit wines. We toured the facilities and tasted their wines and liqueuers. They were interesting. Some were not quite what your average wine snob wants wine to taste like, and some had an unfortunate old-sock smell that detracted substantially from the fruit flavor of the wines themselves, but some were actually pretty nice. We took home a couple bottles of Maidenā€™s Blush, an apple, pear, elderberry blend that has a nice soft dessert wine quality.
After a lovely night at the Brattleboro Holiday Inn Express with a fantastic dinner at Peter Havens (wild pheasant pate, oysters baked with butter and hand-cut bacon, steaks served with fresh, crunchy vegetables and sweet potato spears, and Peter Haven himself stopping to chat at our table) we headed out onto the cheese trail.
The first stop on the "cheese course" that Josh designed for us was a sheep cheese producing farm aptly named Vermont Shepherd. We pulled into the empty driveway and inspected the small stand with signs posted about the history of the farm. Because the owners are full-time farmers and cheese-makers, they are often not available to give guests a tour, so they leave a small refrigerator of cheese and some bundles of clean raw wool in the stand, and guests are left to buy for themselves, on the honor system.
We took a quick walk to see their lovely sheep and bought a piece of their wonderful award-winning cheese that tastes something like the softer, more soothing, complex cousin of Manchengo with a hint of fresh wool in it, and I bought five pounds of cream colored wool to send to a friend who spins yarn.
We also inspected the hole that was once the cellar where James W. Strong, the founder of Carleton College, was born (or so said the sign).
We then headed north, through the most picturesque Vermont towns, to Grafton Village, home of the renowned Grafton Village Cheese Company (next to this wonderful covered bridge). The town of Grafton itself is pretty beautiful, and we cannot wait to spend a weekend there at The Old Tavern at Grafton, but the cheese really was the highlight. We sampled their raw milk cheddar as in its many ages, starting from one-year-old (very strong and sharp) to six-year-old (much milder and nuttier. Though they were all good, I became addicted to the four-year-old cheddar, with its crunchy bits of nutty sugar, and returned for a second, third and tenth taste. Obviously, we bought some, along with some two-year-old cheese. (I have to say, Iā€™ve always known Iā€™m a dairy addict, but when I get to have real raw-milk cheeses, I truly understand what makes those French tick.)
From Grafton we headed to nearby Londonderry to Taylor Farm, producer of the Maple Smoked Gouda that won the award for Best Smoked Cheese recently. In a bare-bones store filled with cheese, locally made soaps, and beautiful yarn, we met Jonathan Wright, the owner and operator of Taylor Farm. He gave us a very personal half-hour tour of his facilities, introduced us to his cows and answered all our questions as if we were guests in his home. It was a wonderful, informative and memorable afternoon.
Finally, on the way home, we stopped in Woodstock Vermont. Too tired to tour another farm, we ended up having a cozy late lunch at Bentleys and window-shopping.
And on the way home, we admired the foliage.
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Living in a small apartment with a cat causes many problems, but not enough problems to keep us from getting a second cat (a picture of him is on the Sept. 14th Pamper Your Pets post. Now this adorable little cat is a teenage terror who knocks over anything with water in it, just because he can. Last night he somehow got onto my desk and tipped over a bowl of water (with floating flowers in it). The water flooded the desk, pooling under my laptop, and now I can't turn my computer on!!!!!!! So unfortunately, all the info I had for tonight's post is lost until I can retrieve all the memory from my harddrive and put it on another computer. I guess apple-picking will have to wait until next week.
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Okay, so I don't have a green thumb. In fact, sometimes I think I have a brown thumb. So this summer, when the rose bush, the gardenia bush, and the lavender bush on my fire escape all stopped blooming for a few weeks, I got really worried. But, thank goodness, this morning my rose bush produced a beautiful pink rose and my lavender bush has a tall, healthy bud coming up. I'm so excited. Maybe it was just the summer heat and not my total incompetence that kept them from blooming.
Posted by georgia at 03:40 PM | Comments (0) | permalink | TrackBack | Email this post
...I'm a 25 year old woman who lives in a tiny one bedroom apartment in a giant city with my guy and two messy cats. I work full time at a job I don't like, then I come home (or head to a coffee shop) and do more work for the career I would like to have. I don't have anything that could be considered a disposable income.
But I do love to entertain. I love to have friends over to make dinner; I love to give people nice gifts; I love to throw parties.
This blog is for all the people like me who want to prove that you don't have to go to culinary school to be a good cook, you donļæ½t have to have a lot of money to give nice gifts, and you don't have to have all the time in the world to be a good hostess (or host) and throw nice parties.
I hope you enjoy it.
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