Life 2.1

I had arrived on Thursday night and Dave took me for pizza. Long Island has not shortage of delis or pizza places with Italian names all claiming the Island’s best pizza. Friday was spent around his hometown of Northport and Saturday was New Year’s Eve, which was spent in Queens with his friends from high school (all of whom were lovely and hilarious and fun). We lounged New Year’s Day. He got bagels for breakfast brunch from one his favorite places and we walked from his parents’ house to the beach, where it was brisk, but nice. We visited the North Fork for wine tasting on Tuesday, where we ended up bringing back 14 or so bottles. I fell asleep in the car. Dave found it hilarious to take a picture of my with my head back, completely knocked out, with my mouth open. It was not one of my more flattering pictures but it brings him immeasurable entertainment. I will delete it off his phone when he isn’t looking.

We made it home in time to watch the Oregon Ducks emerge as Rose Bowl Champions. Fantastic. Tuesday was the day to go to NYC. I could give you a play-by-play of the trip into NYC but the visual tour just does it so much more justice. (click to enlarge)

 
 

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

We shopped on Wednesday and I got a taste of some Long Island culture when a mother of two began yelling (in a voice not unlike that of Janice from “Friends”) at her young son for pushing his younger brother in a stroller while she was busy in J Crew. Later, another woman who donned bleached white hair, a faux fur wrap, serious raccoon eyes and enough gold jewelry to retire thanks to cash4gold.com, was wearing so much perfume, I had a sneezing fit. My eyes began to swell and it was all down hill. We left and I went home and napped. Then took a long steaming shower to remove that horrific scent from my nasal cavities. Long Island Mall: 1, Colleen: 0.

Thursday I had sushi. Kind of. I had bites of Dave’s tuna because the seaweed brings back awful flashbacks from college where we had 3 rice cookers (one of which was branded with Hello Kitty) and a constant supply of dried seaweed and kimchee. I actually ordered the teriyaki chicken because I wasn’t feeling adventurous. But his tuna roll thing was tasty. We spent the evening on our last full day in Queens again, having dinner with Eric and Maria. Maria is Irish and her accent is fairly awesome. The 4 of us laughed, drank wine and indulged in what we all agreed were calories that don’t count since we were on vacation. I really enjoyed having dinner with the two of them (our hosts from NYE) and I’m glad Dave got to spend some time with them too.

Friday was spent in the air before we landed in SFO. Vacation was officially over 12 hours later when I was back at work but at least I had a full week to unplug and unwind.

It was fantastic.

No Comments | In: Social Adventures | tags: New York, vacation. | #

I love Dave’s hometown. We walked around the village yesterday, down to the dock. It was sunny and 50 degrees (in New York. In late December.) Fabulous.

No Comments | In: Social Adventures, Thoughts & Ponderings | tags: New York, Northport, vacation. | #

I have been told that I’m a breakfast elitist.

This means that I refuse to eat breakfast unless I can have an elaborate spread or fancy treats for breakfast. Oatmeal before work? Not for me. Cereal? Too plain. Bacon, eggs, pancakes, pastries? You betcha.

I just don’t enjoy standard work week breakfast fare. It’s okay from time to time, but in the mornings, especially in the winter, I could sleep in a bit more rather than make breakfast and if you know me and how much I enjoy food, giving up a meal for sleep must mean that I REALLY like sleep.. The quick breakfast stuff bores me but I could do it in a pinch. Other people I know ahem eat breakfast every day and refuse to accept that a cup of coffee serves as the “most important meal of the day.”

Sigh.

On the weekends, however, I love doing up breakfast. This weekend, Sunday breakfast (which was actually more like brunch by the time it was started and completed) included cinnamon sugar popovers. So easy and so yummy.

When getting coffee with Dave one morning, he had ordered a morning bun…you know, those cinnamon sugar pastry treats? Well, it was delicious and I’m sure that he probably regrets introducing me to those. Not only because he made the mistake of sharing the one that he bought for himself, but also because I found a fabulously easy recipe that yields damn near perfect results (very rarely can I say that a recipe I try comes out as good as what I have in mind) and I can now make them at will.

The foundation for this recipe comes from the blog A Sweet Spoonful with some minor tweaks of my own to make up for ingredients/items I didn’t have:

Cinnamon Sugar Popovers
Yield: 8 popovers
I made my popovers in a muffin tin although you can purchase a special popover pan if you’re so inclined; I’m just a fan of using what I have in my own cupboards. If you do use a popover pan, this recipe should yield 6 popovers whereas if you use a muffin tin, you’ll end up with 8. High heat is important to the success of these popovers so when you’re ready to fill your pan, remove it from the oven quickly and make sure not to open and close the oven door while they’re baking. These are really best the day they’re made. Preferably warm.

Adapted from: Cook’s Illustrated

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 1 cup whole milk (*Note from CL: I used half-and-half because I didn’t have whole milk*)
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 5 teaspoons vegetable oil

For the cinnamon sugar top:

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (*Note from CL: I used 2 teaspoons because 1 just didn’t look like enough.)
• 1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 450 F. Blend the eggs and milk together in a blender until combined. Add flour, melted butter, salt, cinnamon and vanilla until smooth and bubbly, about one minute. Let the batter rest for 30 minutes.

While the batter is resting, it’s time to heat up the muffin pan. Pour 1/2 teaspoon of oil into each muffin cup, using only the outer 8 tins (leave the center ones empty — they won’t heat as evenly). Adjust oven rack to lowest position and make sure there’s not a rack directly above — remember your popovers are going to rise and you don’t want another oven rack to squish them. After the batter has rested 20 minutes, place pan in oven to heat the oil. You want the pan to have a good 10 minutes in the oven to heat.

After batter has rested, remove pan from the oven and, working quickly, divide batter amongst the 8 muffin cups. Return to oven and bake for 20 minutes (don’t open the oven door). Then lower heat to 350 F and continue to bake until popovers are golden brown, about 15 minutes more. After removing from the oven, gently flip them out onto a wire rack. I used a butter knife here–sometimes they take a little shimmying.

For the cinnamon sugar topping: mix the sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl. Thoroughly brush each popover all over with the 1/4 cup of melted butter, then dredge each puff generously in the sugar mixture. Enjoy warm.

Oh and let me tell you. We did enjoy them. Seriously delicious. If I could have these every morning, then I would eat breakfast every morning. My weight would also triple, but whatever.

No Comments | In: Delicious-flavored foods | tags: baking, breakfast, cinnamon, pastry, popover, sugar. | #

I have been trying to figure out what to blog lately and honestly, I don’t know what I’ve been doing with my time. As in, how it is possible to have more time and not do anything of substance (read: I’ve done nothing the internet would be excited to read about). Except for adventures in the kitchen, which can be comical. Like the time I tried to make tomato soup and my food processor broke, sending tomato soup all over the kitchen and me. That was solid. Dave asked if I was turning my blog into a cooking blog the other day. I told him not intentionally, but since I like food, I could see why he’d ask that.

The busy season behind us, he and I have time to cook now (or rather, he likes to cook and I like to eat. Grin) so most evenings we can be found making dinner together (I’m an excellent sous chef). Usually at least one night a week, I’ll take the lead in the kitchen but he does such a good job, I’d rather just sit on the counter and watch with a glass of wine in my hand help him.

My parents came over for dinner last weekend. Dave rustled up a roasted chicken and some rosemary potatoes (because I assured him it wasn’t a balanced meal without a carb-licious side starch) and a lovely green salad with pomegranate seeds, pine nuts and a vinaigrette. We had persimmon cookies for dessert.

I handle the baking.

The night before that, we tried our hands at recreating pizzas from Pizzeria Azzurro in Napa. I made the dough the night before (thankyouverymuch Sunset cookbook, for providing the recipe for Delfina’s Pizza Dough) and we got 4 different kinds of delicious cheeses (mozzarella and parm were the obvious choices but we also added in ricotta and chevre, in an effort to recreate Azzurro’s “Formaggio” pizza). We couldn’t remember if the pizza we’d ordered one night had sauce or not (it must have had something besides dough and cheese but we couldn’t remember), so we improvised and in our travels to Whole Foods found a white pasta sauce with porcini mushrooms, so we had a pizza bake-off. Yes. It IS as delicious as it sounds.

We made one pizza with the sauce and one without (since I had 3 pizza dough balls to mess with and that was after I had halved the Delfino’s recipe). The sauced pie was the clear winner. The other one, though also tasty, was merely a way to consume massive amounts of cheese. The sauced pizza was a meal. And a delicious one at that. We opted to use the third pizza dough ball to make appetizers for my parents the next night and they were fans too so we knew we had a winning recipe.

And it was pretty easy, as long as you didn’t get the idea to make pizza five minutes before wanting to eat said pizza. The dough can be made the day/night before, which is what we did. Here’s the dough recipe here. I also have the Sunset cookbook, which is what I was thumbing through when the pizza brainstorm came to us but for the purpose of sharing, this works too.

For the pizza, we just pre-baked the pan in a 550-degree oven, because that’s as high as it would go, for 20-30 minutes or so, then got to pizza creating. We sauced them, cheese-ed them and baked them for about 5 minutes before enjoying all that cheesey-dough goodness.

Like an idiot, I didn’t take a photo of them out of the oven, because clearly they looked delicious and I was too distracted by them to remember. But trust me. Yum.

No Comments | In: Delicious-flavored foods | tags: baking, cooking, pizza, recipes. | #

We always do two Thanksgivings in my family. One on the actual Thursday with my dad’s side and the other on what is dubbed Thanksgiving Saturday, which finds us celebrating with my mom’s side. I was off the hook for cooking on Thursday, as my uncle had it all buttoned up in the kitchen. Dave and I donated wine to the cause, because that is always useful.

Saturday, however, I volunteered some desserts. So Friday was spent baking tasty recipes I had seen online or in my travels. I made Pumpkin-Chocolate Bars (saw that one one the TODAY Show one morning before work) and they were festive for the season but I really wanted a chocolate pie.

So I did what I always do when I need a recipe: I opened a google search window.

That’s when I stumbled upon a gem of a recipe for “Gundy’s Chocolate Pie” only, I wanted an oreo crust. Luckily for me, Katie, of Chaos in the Kitchen had a recipe for that too:
Oreo Cookie Pie Crust
Yield: one 9-inch pie crust
prep 10 min, cook 10 min

• 24 Oreo cookies
• 1/4 cup butter, melted

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Place Oreos in a large plastic zip top bag and smash the heck out of them. A flat mallet or rolling pin works great. You could probably also use a food processor (yep, that’s what I did–worked well, too). Try to get Oreos to a consistent crumby mush. The filling should resemble moist crumbs (if you do this by hand there will be a few larger pieces in the mix, this is fine). Empty crumbs into a mixing bowl and stir in melted butter until well combined. Pat wet crumbs all over and up sides of pie dish, making an even surface. Bake crust for 8-10 minutes or until hardened. Cool before filling.

So, I had my pie crust (chilling in the freezer after baking, actually) and I began working on the chocolate pie.
(adapted from Chaos in the Kitchen)

prep 5 min, cook 15 min

• 1 pie shell prepared and baked (see above)
• 2 cups milk, any kind, but 1% worked well
• 3 egg yolks, beaten
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 5 tbsp flour
• 3 tbsp cocoa
• 2 tbsp butter, chopped
• 1 tsp vanilla

Directions:
Combine milk, egg yolks, sugar, salt, flour, and cocoa in a cold saucepan (literally put it in the freezer for a bit). Stir thoroughly to combine. Turn heat to medium, stir constantly until thick but do not boil. Once thick, remove from heat, stir in butter and vanilla. Let mixture cool slightly and pour into baked pie shell. Chill.

So. simply enough, right? Yea. Not so much if you’re impatient like me. See that part above where it says “once thick”? Yea. Get it thick. If you don’t and you’re too impatient, your pie will look like this:

Which is problematic when you have to be somewhere that afternoon with said pie. On the plus side, the crust was tasty (which is why the right side is hacked off…I didn’t screw that part up, thankfully!)

So I went around again for round 2, with Dave running to the store for more eggs for me. The second time around (after many calls to Dave to come look at it and tell me what he thinks of the consistency) we had a winning pie:

I whipped up some whipped cream (literally) and put it in a tupperware to take with us and thus, the Thanksgiving pie was saved.

No Comments | In: Delicious-flavored foods | tags: baking, chocolate, cooking, pie. | #