to the blogs of friends and others that I like to read.
• Coming soon... Oscar and Stewie products!
...me by email ljcfyimailATgmailDOTcom
Friday, October 10, 2008
The last time Aaron and I went to the movies, I was excited to discover you could buy a mini shaker of white cheddar seasoning for your popcorn. I love cheese popcorn so now I love getting popcorn at the movies even more.
This evening I walked across the bridge with some fun coworkers to find dinner. I also had Domo and Piglet stashed in my purse. They couldn't miss Germany!
Domo was happy to get out.
Piglet enjoyed the walk.
All the buildings look so charming.
Here is where we settled on dinner.
Inside I ordered the world's largest frankfurter. Honestly... I had to chop it up so it fit on the plate. Oh and since I was in Cologne I felt obligated and I drank 1/3 of a Kölsch. Didn't get sick but it's still not my thing.
Despite how optimistic I look, I was only able to finish half of the frankfurter. I had to leave room for apple struesel of course. I also discovered I like red cabbage.
We are loving the veggie haul we are getting from our co-op farm.
This is what we got today... see those two green peppers?
We made them into stuffed peppers for dinner. I don't even like green peppers, but I like stuffed peppers. I just eat the guts out of them and leave the pepper carcass behind. Cheese is also key.
Several people have asked me about pictures of the food I have eaten here in China. One of the best meals I have had was Peking Duck. It is slices of crispy duck that you place on a thin pancake with slices of cucumber, onion and a sweet sauce. I love the lazy susans they use here so everyone can help themselves.
I have had lots of dumplings... steamed and pan fried.
This is "vegetarian shrimp" with deep fried tea leaves. The shrimp are actually made of yam and taste surprisingly like real shrimp. I really liked the tea leaves too, they were salty and sort of like crispy seaweed.
And of course I have had lots of noodles.
I love how the Coke cans are in Chinese. They have special designs for the Olympics too. I have been drinking more orange juice and tea than Coke though.
Today I had a girls day out in Buffalo. We ate at Melting Pot (3 pots of cheese!) and shopped. We also had a bananas foster flambe fondue for dessert. Most exciting was the news that there is a Melting Pot planned for Rochester. It hasn't been decided if it should be at Eastview Mall or Pittsford Plaza. If you live in Rochester, what do you think?
Aaron bought a pizza pan for the grill on sale at Wegmans and we finally decided to try it out. We made the pizza on a peel...
... and then slid it onto the hot pan. We forgot the mozzarella cheese and had to throw it on top in a hurry.
Turned out great! A little thicker than I generally like my pizza (I'm a thin crust gal) but it was nice and crispy. It was nice to have pizza without heating up the kitchen with the oven.
We were driving the wrong direction to the tournament this morning when I spotted The Melting Pot. We decided to go there for dinner. So good. Melted cheese, lobster and steak cooked in broth, melted chocolate. Heaven. Am already plotting to visit The Melting Pot in Buffalo.
I have been very good about remembering my reusable shopping bags lately and plastic bags hardly ever make their way into our house. I was still collecting the occasonal plastic produce bag though, so I ordered these reusable produce bags from ecobags.
They are super light so they don't affect the total weight of your produce. I used to only have to remember my shopping list when I went to the grocery store. I am accumilating more and more things I have take with me!
I love cheese so when it comes to stay with me I want to give it the very best. I ordered these sheets of Formaticum cheese papers. Proper storage and handling can help cheese live longer. This cheese paper is specially designed to help.
Only the best for my cheese.
I also got a cheese journal so I can chronicle each kind of cheese that I encounter.
Ok, I realize that this is a lot of packaging for blueberries. But when I spotted these Fresh Blueberry Blasters made by Nature's Partner at Wegman's I could not resist. I tell myself I can reuse them.
There are holes in the packaging so you can flip open the lid and run water through to wash them.
Why am I such a sucker for this kind of thing? Next I will be buying individually wrapped blueberries.
Like Ultimate Chocolate Cake and Ultimate Carrot Cake, Wegmans now makes Ultimate Brownies! And they come in single servings! I think they are so cute!
And they are really tasty warmed up in the microwave. So much so, i felt the need to warn people off at the office.
We did some experimental camp cooking this weekend.
First we wrapped hot dogs in refridgerated bisquit dough.
When you grill the hot dog over hot coals, the bisquit bakes. Big pig in a blanket. Dip in ketchup. Dip in mustard. Yummers.
We also made special toasted marshmallows. You know how sometimes when you pull a toasted marshmallow off a stick all you get is the toasted "sleeve". That can work to your advantage.
While toasting the marshmallows, add mini candy bars to the end of the stick.
When you pull the marshmallow "sleeve" off, grab the candy bar inside of it.
I almost forgot to report back on the Friendship Bread. I really didn't know what to expect, but we baked it and it was DELICIOUS! Turns out it is a sweet bread... kind of like a coffee cake.
I took the starters to work to give out and everyone was suspicous until they tasted the bread. Joel and Shruti each got one. I had one for Tina or Aprille but another coworker tasted the bread and got it before they did.
That's okay, because contrary to what I previously stated... I kept one bag of starter for myself. So in ten days I will have more to give Tina and Aprille. It's that good. Soon we will all have gurgling bubbling bags slowly taking over our kitchens.
It's grilling season again! We were picking up the steaks at Wegmans when we tried a sample of grilled baby portabella mushrooms and grape tomatoes. I think we have a new favorite summer side dish.
I am also into cooking our corn on the cob on the grill wrapped in foil.
I had a brainstorm last night. We were getting ready to make banana bread with four bananas that were over ripe. Usually we add chocolate chips, but this time I thought... let's add peanut butter chips and mini marshmallows! Combined with the banana it will be like a fluffer nutter baked into bread!
I present to you Jenny's Fluffer Nutter Bread.
I also got to use the Martha Stewart silicone bread pan I got for Christmas. The loaf popped right out. Very nice.
Here is the recipe.
Ljc's Fluffernutter Bread
4 over ripe bananas
1/3 cup melted butter
1 beaten egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup of sugar
1 1/2 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 cup peanut butter chips
1 cup mini marshmallows
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Smash together bananas and butter in a large bowl with a spoon. Mix egg,vanilla and sugar into bananas. Mix in baking soda and salt. Mix in flour. Mix in peanut butter chips and marshmallows. Butter and flour a 4x8 in loaf pan. Pour mixture into loaf pan and bake for one hour.
As demonstrated here... Dutch Babies are pretty easy to make. But I thought I should point out that Williams Sonoma sells an organic Dutch Baby mix now.
I like mine with berries and cream, but the apples look good too.
When I was in high school, someone gave me a zip lock baggie of oozing friendship bread starter. The idea is you let the goo age for 10 days, add ingredients and then you bake it into a loaf of bread. The friendship part comes in when you separate a portion of that aged starter into other bags and give it to friends to make their own bread. And so on. And so forth.
I was obsessed with it. I kept making it. And it kept growing more. Soon we ran out of family members to give the bubbling bags of starter to, but I couldn't bring myself to throw them out. Throw out friendship?! There were gurgling, burping zip lock bags all over our kitchen and my mom finally had to throw them out bringing an end to my manaical bread production streak.
When I came home last week, this was on our kitchen counter. Ack! A coworker bequeathed Aaron with a gooey bag of friendship bread starter. We have begun the process of Day 1 - mush bag, Day 2 - mush bag, Day 3 - mush bag... etc.
This time I am giving away all the starter. I cannot allow our house to become a friendship bread breeding ground.
Tina, Shruti, Aprille and Joel. Prepare yourselves. In a few days you've got some friendship coming your way.
On our way back to Rochester, I spotted this Chipotle sign being hauled north on 390. We should have followed it. I am dying to know where it was going. I can only hope we are getting one in Rochester.
Back in February I read about these solid honey drops called honibe. I thought it was brililant. I love honey in my tea, but bringing it to work inevitably means getting all over my keyboard.
Now I am seeing them mentioned on blogs everywhere. Time to put in an order.
Dutch baby! This is the first time he's made it in the cast iron skillet my mom found for us.
It think it makes the Dutch Baby super poofy which is the cool thing about Dutch Babies.
Oh and the song I like to sing when we have one... (to the tune of Beach Boys "Beach Baby")
*Dutch Baby, Dutch Baby hot in the pan, Gonna taste so good with powdered sugar!*
Here is the Dutch Baby recipe...
4 eggs
1 cup flour
1 cup milk
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons butter
Cut butter into a cast iron pan and heat in a 400 degree oven until the butter melts. While butter is melting, mix other ingredients together. Pull the pan out of oven, pour batter into it and return to the oven. Bake until puffy and browned, about twenty minutes.
These last few bone chilling days, I have abandoned my tea for cups of cocoa. Specifically these single serving packets of holiday cocoa a friend gave me for Christmas.
They are quite possibly the best instant serve cocoa I have had. I typically prefer the work intensive hot chocolate where you heat up milk and melt chunks of chocolate, but that method isn't so great when I am running from meeting to meeting.
These packets were easy but yummy. I think I am going to have to place an online order. If anyone has other recommendations, I would love to hear them.
We are home in PA for Thanksgiving. I wish our drive to my parent's
house took us past Erie. On our way back from Cleveland a few months
ago, we were going through Erie where I noticed a
sign for a Steak 'n
Shake.
It sounded good I persuaded Tina to stop. Apparently Steak 'n Shake
was founded in Normal, Illinois in 1934. (I wish I could say I was from
Normal, Illinois)
The burgers were good, but what really blew me away was their
shakes. I especially liked the Side-by-Side Shake. It's two flavors in
one glass! Brilliant! I had dark chocolate shake and banana shake. By
merely moving my straw from one side of the glass to the other I could
switch flavors. Genius.
When I go to NYC there are certain places I just HAVE to go
to... Jamba Juice,
Pomme Frites
and Secret
Burger Joint. Thanks to some suggestions and wandering
around... I have three more.
This year instead of a typical Halloween party, Aaron and I threw a sit
down dinner party. I cleared the furniture out of the living room and
set up a dinner table with candlelight.
The theme was "mad science" so the table had beakers with dry
ice putting off foggy mist, test tubes strewn about and wine bottles
with POISON labels.
Aaron and I even dressed the part. These were our badges.
I got the laboratory invitations, test tube party favors and
POISON wine bottle labels from Martha Stewart's line of crafts at
Michaels.
Here is a shot of the jelly bean filled test tubes with our guests
names on them.
Aaron made the cornmeal encrusted goat cheese with warm tomato salsa
appetizer. He later served up little petri dishes with green jello in
them for an aperitif.
It was a great evening. More pictures of the Halloween dinner
party are on My
Gallery. Matt took some great pictures too.
I never really thought about my spices being organic or not, so I have
to confess that my real attraction to the Simply Organic
Spices
is the packaging. There, I said it. They look cute in my cupboard and
on the counter next to my freshly baked pumpkin pie. And the fact that
they don't have pesticide or chemicals in them... well that's just a
plus.
I had to try a Cider Slushie of course. It was delicious! This
was the closest
recipe I could find online. I may have to experiment with
this one myself.
Autumn means firing up the crock pot. I picked up a Rita's
Ragin' Cajun Bean Soup mix from the Healthy
Sisters’ Soup & Bean Works booth at the
wool festival.
All I have to do is add it to chicken broth in the morning and
let it stew away while I am work. We come home to a big yummy pot of
soup for dinner.
Today was Aaron's birthday and we went to the Naples
Grape Festival. The best thing I found there was candy apple
with a GRAPE candy coating. They called them grapples. Not to be
confused the the grapples
I have written about here before.
By the way... if you put a singing sparkling candle on
someone's birthday cake, be sure you don't have other candles on the
cake that the singing sparking candle may pop open and be melted by.
Heh heh.
I got into Boston last night and already I have had lobster and the
yummiest clam chowder at the Union Oyster House
and an ice cream injected cupcake at Trani. Thank you
to everyone who has left me recommendations! You are the best! I can
tell this is going to be an awesome weekend.
We are in the North End and I love it. There is a cute
cobblestone street with pubs and cafes around every corner. Couldn't be
cuter or more charming. Heading out now to explore...
On our last day in Toronto we went into a grocery store and bought food
for a quick little picnic. Tina and I each got one of these petite
baguettes and split a block of brie.
I think it is the cutest little baguette ever. I just love
miniature food. In fact I started a Flickr
group for pictures of miniature food. Check it out, coo over
the itty bitty food items and add your own pictures if you have them.
When I was in LA I got one of these Bear Paws from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.
A marshmallow coated in caramel, rolled in rice krispies, covered in
white chocolate. Be still my beating heart.
I saw these chips in the check out line at Target. I knew Ming Tsai
made Blue Ginger gourmet food products for Target, but this was the
first I had seen the chips. They didn't have full size bags... just the
snack size. The Hot Tamari Rice Corn Chips are de-li-cious! I had to
buy five of the little bags.
Aprille brought in these delicious pastries from Genesee
Bakery called Tea Leaves.
Now I have had elephant
ears and beavers
tails, and that is what I though these would be like. Oh no.
They are a crispy puff pastry with a sugary glaze on top. They are
heavenly.
I have done some extensive googling and I cannot find anything
like them online. I briefly thought they might be like Palm
Leaves or Palmiers (also called elephant ears) but I don't
think they are.
I did however stumble upon Fried Coke
while I was searching so it was somewhat productive.
(almost simultaneously Aprille emailed me about Deep
Fried Pepsi... freaky)
Our CSA farmer told us he dehydrated watermelon and it turned out like
delicious fruit leather. We have successfully dried bananas and apples
in our food dehydrator so we were pretty excited. Aaron sliced up half
a watermelon and it sat in the hydrator for 24 hours.
It tasted horrible. It tasted like rotten watermelon. Anyone
out there ever dehydrate watermelon with better results? Or have other
good dehydrating ideas/recipes?
Remember the strawberry
popcorn I planted in my garden last year? Well, we were
sitting around the firepit when I got the bright idea to pop it in our
outdoor popcorn popper.
It popped... quietly and without much gusto. Look at the tiny
little kernels we ended up with.
We won't be putting Orville Redenbacher out of business
anytime soon. (check out Orville's gourmet
recipes!)
This weekend we went to the Taste of Rochester.
They close down a street and there are restaurants set up with $1, $2,
$3 and $4 offerings. I was totally into eating all the $1
foods. You get small portions, but you get to try all kinds of stuff. I
could eat like that all the time. In the $1 range I had crab meat
rangoons, bruchetta, a maple crepette, a homemade meatball, a slider
burger, corn on the cob, a spring roll and a banana strawberry
smoothie.
It was a fun evening but I only have pictures of us with the
Geico Gecko. Once we started eating I was too busy to take pictures.
This evening we hit up two concerts... Cherry Poppin' Daddies
at the Party in the
Park and Michelle Shocked at Big City Summer Fest.
We probably would not have thought to go to Michelle's concert but Joel
is a toe tappin, finger snappin' Shocked groupie with contagious
enthusiasm.
Of course one of my favorite things about the Party in the
Park
concerts is getting the Salt Potatoes. But really... look close...
don't you think they should be called Butter Potatoes? Oh happy day!
(I had never had Salt
Potatoes until I moved to Rochester... apparently they are a
regional thing)
I was disapointed to discover that Jamba Juice was no longer
in Atlanta. Today on our way to the office we found a different
smoothie place called Robeks.
I was amazed at how much it looked like Jamba.
Back in the rental with our smoothies, Joel took a slurp and
announced... "It's good but it's not Jamba". I had say "Look it's all
I've got. Can you just let me pretend!?"
So sad.
We are flying back to Rochester tonight. No cupcakes. No
Jamba.
I am in Atlanta a couple days for work and we have hit the
ground running.
Joel found Varsity,
The World's Largest Drive-in Restaurant. It has been in Atlanta since
1928. The cheeseburgers were okay, the fries good and the chocolate
shake fantastic. I love the tray they hook onto your window.
I made a mess of myself eating in the car however. When
we got to our hotel I discovered I had ketchup and chocolate shake all
over the front of my shirt.
We don't have much time here... but are there any "must see's"?
Quite awhile ago Shruti was trying to explain to me how Indian
Mangoes are different from the mangoes I was used to. March through May
there is Mango
Mania in Mumbai.
After an 18 year ban the US
is once again importing Indian Mangoes. I spotted a stack of
them at Wegmans, and despite the rather high price tag, I bought one. I
brought it to work bundled in it's little styrofoam net for all to
enjoy. We carved it up at lunch and we all agreed it was rather tasty.
Shruti said it wasn't quite ripe like the ones in India and she had a
wistful look on her face while she ate it.
(My knife is cute right? It's a Kuhn
Rikon I got at Williams Sonoma because I needed a knife with
a sheath so I could carry it to work in my lunch bag without stabbing
myself. It works great.)
Today was our first pick up at our CSA farm. We got to meet the goats, chickens and one very large angry turkey. This weeks harvest was lettuce, radishes, onions and another bag of lettucey looking stuff. We also picked a bunch of strawberries... yum yum.
I was at scooter club on wednesday when I noticed cards for a
South Wedge Farmers Market on thursdays.
The card said it was Rochester's only local sustainable
farmers' market, so after work today we headed over to check it
out.
Being so early in the season, it was mostly lettuce, lettuce
and more lettuce, but I think it will be really nice this summer. We
bought two heads of lettuce and will definitely be back to check it out
again.
This saturday is our first veggie pick up at the CSA farm and
we are pretty excited.
I read about this sandwich and I think about it all the time.
It is called a Pig's Ass Sandwich! It has... "two types of pork butt (a.k.a. pork shoulder), one
that’s beenbrined and glazed with maple syrup like a baked ham, the other one
rubbed with a slew of spices and Peet’s coffee and thenslow-roasted and shredded like pulled pork. "
Ahhhh!
Coming off a Henry's popcorn addiction from the Lilac Festival, I spotted these bags of Popcorn, Indiana popcorn at Wegmans. Turns out there is a real town called
Popcorn in Indiana.
The popcorn is all natural and comes in flavors like kettlecorn,
spicey honey mustard, summer picnic bbq and smoked cheddar cheese. You
can even have it delivered to your door.
I had a BBQ and it was yummm- eee.
(a little more info on Henry for those who know whom I speak of...
"Chronically long lines are part of the testimony to Henry's
popularity. Henry, the man at the kettle with the long wooden paddle,
looks like a Mennonite in an Eddie Bauer wardrobe upgrade. In
actuality, Henry was a lawyer in a past life. His straw hat is not just
for show. When he pours the kernels into the hot oil, the bowed rim
guards against hot splatterings.")
Even though I only have furry children, I get to celebrate
Mother's Day.
For breakfast Aaron made me a Dutch Baby with whipped cream
and berries. It was buttery-licious!
Oscar and Stewie pooled their pennies together and bought me
two Japanese Maples for the front yard. We went to our local Oriental
Garden Supply where they have greenhouse after greenhouse of Japanese
Maples to choose fr
