Top 50 List

Just wanted to point out this fun list of the top 50 food blogs according to the Times of London(no, I'm not featured in it...yet;).
Fifty more ways to cyberloaf.

Still Life with Hittebestendig...

You've already met my red brown betty.

Now I bring you my hittebestendig Glazen Theelichte.

According to the charmingly outdated script on the lid of the packaging, this Theelichte will:

houdt thee of koffie op de juiste temperatuur en geeft een gezellige sfeer op tafel

Yes, folks. This beautiful glass tealight will heat your tea or coffee to just the right temperature...on your table. I'm missing a bit of the middle part...any guesses? (E, this one's for you:)

Street Food

This is the lifetime supply of veggie fried rice that I bought at a street side vendor today, rendered all the more appetizing by the soothing glow of my windowless office's neon strips. The rice is tasteless, a bit hard, and the three vegetables that made their way in are floppy and grim. There is also half of a grey fried egg mixed in. Yuck.

Was I crazy to buy something from a street vendor? Perhaps. But you can't blame a girl for trying. Maybe I'm hoping to find my own magnificent street food reminiscent of Singapore, Bangkok, and Tokyo. Paris has their crepes and baguette sandwiches and all German-speaking countries feature kiosks of delicious bratwurst, beer, and pommes frites.

And I have enjoyed my fair share of street food right here at festivals and fairs, mostly of the fried dough variety (including Mozzarepas deliciosas).

What I now realize is that in this case, I should have been more observant. The stall I went to, while pretty popular, is on a restaurant-starved strip of Longwood Avenue in Boston catering to a time-starved clientele of medical students and hospital personnel. If it had been surrounded by lunching holes and still attracting a crowd, then I would have been in business (instead of, inexplicably, them).

The ultimate insult, though, is that fried rice can be so delicious soooo easily. Fry an onion, fry an egg, rice, soy sauce, and boom. Instant deliciousness. It has been years since I have made my own at home, though, so this experience left me feeling inspired to revisit my stir-fry and fried rice days.

More to come on this in the weeks to come, then...

White Icing

I have, as you may have guessed, been on a quest for a while for the perfect way to finish off a cake or cupcake. I have tried several buttery frostings from Nigella, magazines, etc., but have been left with the feeling that it's all a bit too much. Now, I like frosting, I really do, but I have my issues with it.

1) the ratios are frequently off, both in the recipe quantities and for bakery-bought gourmet, resulting in a would-you-like-some-cake-with-that-frosting? ratio
2) this, in turn, overpowers a simple, fresh, crumbly cake
which is 3) compounded by the fact that butter cream is heavy and rich.

If you spread it thinly over a cake, it can be a nice counterbalance, but more frequently than not, it is slathered on and mounded high and quite frankly, it's gross. If I am going to each a rich dessert, I would rather eat chocolate mousse or cheesecake or molten chocolate lava cake or truffles...the list goes on.

A cupcake is delightful for its lightness, its airiness.

Throughout this quest, I kept thinking about the icing my mother made when I was a child, and I was sure I was remembering it wrong. Didn't my mother make icing simply with powdered sugar and water mixed into a smooth paste?

But no matter which cookbook I tried, I couldn't find this written down anywhere. Not even as a quick hint for a lighter, easier alternative (and I can't believe I didn't think to ask her - d'oh!). When I couldn't take it anymore, I googled "icing water," and this was the first response. I hadn't been imagining it all along!


It makes the prettiest icing, drying almost immediately into a sweet glaze with great tooth-feel. Just add a little bit of water to powdered sugar until it becomes a paste, then smooth over the cake or cookie surface. This a perfect base to add food coloring too, and you can also dampen the sugar with lemon or orange juice for a little zing.

Ina Garten's Elephant Ears

No, I'm not being rude about the Barefoot Contessa. I recently walked past her at a trade show and she was just as adorable in person as she is on the covers of her cookbooks! There is nothing wrong with her ears.

Ina Garten's recipe for palmiers, or elephant ears, is stunningly simple, and something I come back to again and again. I generally do not gravitate toward recipes that involve pre-made ingredients...but this is one heck of an exception because the only ingredient you need to add is sugar! And you need a flair for folding.

Palmiers

1 sheet of Pepperidge Farm puff pastry, out of the freezer for 10 minutes
sugar

The Barefoot Contessa's recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar total, but I would suggest using 1/2 cup total, because there is always way too much sugar left on the counter at the end.

Spread half of the sugar on the counter. I also always add cinnamon:


Unfold the puff pastry and roll it out onto the sugar until it's a rectangle of about 9 x 14".

Sprinkle the surface of the rectangle with the second portion of sugar.

Fold the shorter edges in towards halfway towards the middle, then fold those edges in all the way to the middle. Then close the pastry "like a book" as she says.

Slice the pastry log with a very sharp knife into 1/4 inch cookies. Sprinkle or press any remaining sugar into the open sides of the cookies, and arrange half an inch apart on a non-stick baking sheet or a sheet lined with waxed paper or Silpat. This is essential as the sugar melts and oozes onto the baking sheets.

Bake in a 450 ­º oven, 6 min one side, 5 the other until caramelized and bubbling. They are pretty irresistible out of the oven, but if you can wait until they are cooled, they will reward you with sugary snapping and fresh pastry flavor.

Mezze

My dad came to visit recently, and we were delighted to go with him to our best local Lebanese grocery store, Arax (judging by these reviews, though, we're obviously shopping there for the wrong reasons...). Although J and I do pretty well by the store, buying a vast array of juicy olives, grape leaves, spices, molokhia, and tahini, I knew my dad would open our eyes to many other things that we were not familiar with.

After a good hour in the tiny store, we walked off with fresh green Lebanese olives, Egyptian roumi cheese (which my dad hadn't seen since he was a young child) and Bulgarian feta, basturma, soujouk, little almond cakes stuffed with pistachios or dates and covered in powdered sugar, labneh balls in olive oil, fresh jams, loukoum, pickled radishes...well, as you can see, we made out quite well.

Happy St. Hatrick's Day

Quick non-food related post here. J and I stopped by a local Irish specialty store - gifts, food, clothes - and found this tremendous treasure trove of hats! I had no idea fabulous woolly hats were an Irish specialty, but these were simply gorgeous.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!