Too bad Thanksgiving, then a fun weekend getaway, then the hubbub of the holidays has to get in the way. It’s always something, I tell ya. 

But to all y’all out there, have a GREAT Thanksgiving holiday. May it be full of tasty food, fanciful conversation, deep belly laughs and plenty of good friends and special family. Rock out. 

I’ll end with a random conversation from last night. 

Bryan (yelling from the living room as I was getting in bed): Katie! You left your new textured thighs out here! 

Me: Huh?

Bryan: Your textured thighs are sitting on the arm of the couch!!

Me: HUH? My textured thighs are right here, attached to me, in bed!!!!

Turns out he was talking about these. Ahaha.

By Jason Fulford for the book Eat Me.

(Via Laughing Squid)

For me, food photography perfection generally comes in the form of pictures of doner meat in kebab shop windows. However, Paris-based Amelie Lombard might just take the edge on even the most enticing of rat-based fare.

Alors, lunchtime!

Remember the amazingly delicious soda bread recipe I mentioned last week? We nibbled on it for the next couple days, and both B and I thought that it tasted much like a scone.

Lightbulb!! I love crumbly scones, and had no idea that making some at home could be so easy. So on Sunday morning we dug in, and transformed the soda bread recipe into delicious raspberry and blueberry scones. 

How did we do it? Easy peasy!

Make the dough as directed in the recipe. 

Knead, knead, knead. And don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. It’s exhilerating. Then, mold out a little hole in the middle of your big dough pile. 

Fill that hole with a mix-in of your choosing. We used frozen raspberries and blueberries that we always have on hand for smoothies, but you could add whatever your little heart desires. Chocolate chips, raisins, banana, nuts, etc. 

Then you just mix it up real good, and separate the big blob into individual-scone-sized blobs. 

We drizzled ours with buttermilk/butter and sprinkled them with sugar. 

Then you bake them for a little less time than the soda bread recipe, and POOF! Delicious homemade scones for a fraction of the price of the bakery down the street. YUM. Scones, coffee and the bright sun make for happy Sunday mornings. 

We had a few people over for dinner last night, and Bryan made this amazingly delicious soda bread to go along with our beef stew. It was insanely tasty, and the fact that he brushed it will melted butter and buttermilk only made it better. Give it a try- it doesn’t use yeast so you don’t have to wait for it to rise or anything! An easy YUM.

Ask Bryan if he ever wants to hear the word ‘cakeballs’ again. I’m guessing his answer would be no, because I may or may not have been overly obsessed with these little rolls of joy this weekend. All day Friday I talked about them, all afternoon on Saturday I slaved over them, and all day Sunday I cursed myself for indulging in them. 

I think the initial appeal of the recipe came from the name. Who wouldn’t want to bring a tiered platter of various cakeballs to a party? 

Original recipe from the esteemed Bakerella. My version here. It’s based on a mix, but I imagine you can follow the same directions substituting from scratch cake and frosting. You can also try it with other cake combinations.

Ingredients:

1 box cake 

1 can frosting

some almond bark

Directions:

1. Make a 13×9 cake, as directed on box. I chose Devil’s food. 
2. Let that cake cool.
3. Crumble the cake into a big bowl, and mix with your can of frosting. I chose buttercream. 
4. Roll the frosting/cake mixture into balls. Chill in fridge or freezer until firm. 
5. Melt almond bark stuff (I had chocolate and white chocolate) on stove. Dip balls in almond bark with a spoon, shaking off excess almond bark. 
6. Set on waxed paper and let cool.
7. Admire and devour cakeballs. 

CAKEBALLS!

See those ones on the far right? They are my special invention. I added peanut butter, butterscotch chips and reese’s pieces to the chocolate almond bark as it was melting on the stove top. They were delicious. I am an official cakeball genius.

Pie Crust is used to make crust for pie. Of course. But have you thought of all the alternate uses of the culinary wonder? Refrigerated pie crust is so versatile and convenient, and I’m not just saying that because it happens to be one of my favorite projects at work these days. I just like pie crusts, plain and simple. I’m a crust, crumble, corner piece type of gal.

Here are a few of my favorites genius pie crust applications that I have run across on the deep, delicious interwebs.

Pies in a Jar! from Bleubird Vintage . Sounds weird at first, but take a look and you’ll see how darn adorable and ridiculously creative it is.

Pie Crust Cut-Outs with Pumpkin Dip from Weekend Cook

Upside Down Apple Pecan Pie from Tidy Mom, a recipe that is very similar to Topsy Turvy Apple Pie

You can do it too, friends. Give a pie a try!

In my opinion, of all the laydeez in the world, Scarlett Johansson is one of the hottest, as proved by her latest shoot for Mango, shot by Mario Sorrenti.

One love of my life is my childhood friend Rijul and he and I were reminiscing the other day about dinners from Blue Nile, a Pune institution with an Iranian flair famed for its delicious biryani. So we decided to go and almost got mauled by a winged bat on the back of Rijul’s motorcycle in the process. We get there and like any night, the place is busy. We had to wait for a table on plastic chairs amid crates of Thumbs Up and Coke. It is airy and unpretentious and filled with the fragrant aromas of their specialties. The tandoori chicken and mutton biryani in particular. Inside, we were joined by Daniel for spicy seekh kebabs, succulent reshmi kebabs, and the signature Blue Nile mutton curry. The nostalgic biryani, delicious but greasy had me in a daze. Nothing that couldn’t be washed down with a cold maaza. Or a caramel custard, another thing they do well except not on this particular night. I still love the bustle in their expansive dining room – fans quietly whirring on high ceilings, arched windows and tall pillars. It’s unfortunate that the quality is slightly less remarkable to what it was when I was a child, and everybody agrees. It’s still tasty as hell though. And the efficient service is bar none.

Blue Nile. 4, Bund Garden Road, opposite Pune Club, Pune – 411 001

I love the pie. Do you?

Why is it that things which are bad for you must always look so damn good? Here, homemade pizza has just enough cheesy, meaty, doughy badness to make you drool — and clog an artery. I ate some anyway.

*

One of the movies that I never watched — even though friends kept telling me that I should, even though I knew I would enjoy it in that appalled and horrified way that is the proper reaction to most good documentaries, even though I was interested in the subject — was Super Size Me. I’d describe it, but something tells me that the majority of the world has already seen it and is on to pondering other things, like Obama’s new Peace Prize and their strawberry cow on Farmville (and, oh gods, can you tell I’m back in the U.S., with access from everything from the Internet and Netflix to the New York Times and Rolling Stone?).

Point. I’ll get back to it eventually. Or, rather right about now. So I saw that YouTube has started doing movies, and when I realized that Super Size Me was one of their movie options (along with, oddly enough, Cutter, which I actually could not stop watching. I have no idea why, considering it’s a movie about… uh…. mowing the lawn ala Best In Show.), I decided I would watch it. (Also, another note: I just opened up YouTube to get the link for Cutter, and what should be across the top, but a banner ad for Wendy’s Fast Food. Go figure.).

Yes, I am the Queen of Segues today. You may call me Queenie.

Back to what’s bad for me. Fast food is, apparently, very bad for me. I knew this already and have mostly boycotted fast food places ever since my first semester of college, when I wrote a paper on how McDonald’s was killing the rainforest (raising cheap cows + cutting down trees for grazing land = buh buh rainforest. yes, this was the whole extent of my paper. What do you want? I wrote it at two in the morning.). Not walking is bad for me. I knew this too.

But the movie got me thinking about what else I do that’s bad for me. How would it affect me if I gave them all up for a month? (Because I’m not about to imbibe in them solely for a month). And, it got me thinking about education and fault, since much of the movie asks: Whose fault is it that we’re fat? Ours? Our parents? The companies? Can you sue a company for offering something that you want? Can you sue them if they target toward children? I mean, really, Facebook is making me fat. Don’t I get some kind of monetary compensation here?

But in truth, I’m a smart, educated, aware person. And yet, I do things that are bad for me. Things that I KNOW are bad for me. My fault? I have to say, “Hell yes!” If I have all the facts and I do something anyway, then I am the only one that can be held responsible (Okay, not the only one, but I do think that most of the onus falls directly into my lap — or my stomach, as the case may be).

My list of things that I know are bad for me, but which I do anyway:

• Sitting on my butt for a job. I love writing, but I was a much healthier creature when I was tending bar. Okay, maybe not healthier — second-hand smoke – odd hours – strangers grabbing my ass + all the walking I was doing = high stress levels + bad lungs + really great legs.
• Guilt. See the rest of this list.
• Internet surfing. What a gloriously bad waste of precious time.
• Caffeine. I love my coffee and the occasional glass of diet soda (ack! ack! chemicals).
• Dairy. I gave up dairy once, to see if it would help my rosacea. It did, but it also made me an insane person, the kind who would call friends up and say, “Hi! I would kill you for a cookie! Or ice cream! Oh my god, I would kill the whole world for a lick of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream!”
• Dairy+. Ever notice how dairy goes best with things that are bad for you? Sour cream on nachos. Cheese on pizza. Ice cream on, well, anything and everything.
• Meat. Oh my god, I love me some meat. Especially, dare I say it?, pork. Mmm… pork. (Notice I started this blog at 5 pm, and you’re not seeing it until now? That’s because in the act of writing pork, I remembered that there was said pork in the fridge, marinated in Jack Daniel’s sauce, and I went off to cook it and eat it. And now my fingers are sticky on the keys and my teeth are full of whiskey-flavored meat.)

Things I’ve given up that were bad for me:

• Smoking. And breathing second-hand smoke.
• Most drinking.
• Stress. How can you give up stress, you ask? Well, obviously, you can’t. But I’m working on making my life as stress-free as possible. As one of my favorite people says, “Is it a little rock or a big rock in the rock-filled jar of life? Because you only get to stress if it’s a big rock.” (Only she says it much more articulately that I just did.).
• Venomous people. They are gone, buh buh. Just like Micky Dee’s rainforests.
• Watching TV. See: Internet.

Now, on to the important list. The things I do right now, at this very moment, day-to-day that are good for me:

• Morning cocktail: multi-vitamin + good bacteria + cranberry pills.
• Orgasms. Oh, yes, these are so so so very good for you. Trust me. I’m not a doctor, but I play one on the Internet.
• Walking for pleasure.
• Writing. It’s good for me. I can’t explain it.
• Floss.
• Fruit and veggies. Nom nom nom.
• Talk to friends, really really talk to friends and tell them that I care about them. Hokey? Yes. Good for me (and for them)? Hellz yes.

And you? What do you do that’s good, bad or ugly? Surely I can’t be the only one who’s beating up my body and mind, even though I know better.

Far and fast, s.

*

“I think the saturated fats are cutting off the blood flow to his penis.” ~Morgan Spurlock’s girlfriend, as quoted in Super Size Me.

]]> http://thefabricofmylife.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/coco-licious/ Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:39:55 +0000 kate http://thefabricofmylife.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/coco-licious/

{katie quinn davies}

this week, it’s national chocolate week, the perfect time for me to indulge my sweet tooth, and share with you some of my favourite chocolate finds from the world-wide-web (this is also wholly appropriate as this is my 100th post! i cannot believe how quickly it has come round!):

* i can’t wait to try out the chocolate truffle cake recipe from food photographer katie quinn davies’ what katie ate blog. i’m also excited by steenberg’s luxury chocolate brownies recipe, they sound so yummy!

*vosges haut chocolat do amazing fusion truffles including black pearl (ginger and wasabi flavoured dark chocolate with black sesame seeds), budapest (flavoured with sweet hungarian paprika), viola (topped with a candied violet petal) and absinthe (chinese star anise, fennel and pastis flavoured dark chocolate, dusted with cocoa powder). i love unusual cmbinations in chocolate, especially the juxtapositions between sweet and salty or sweet and spicy.

*this thursday (15th october), you can join paul a. young at his islington chocolaterie, for his sought-after chocolate tasting workshop, where you will discover a wide variety of  fine chocolates, from single origin brands to vintage chocolate and unique, rare connocations (i wish i was in town for this!). he also has a new book, adventures in chocolate, which you can pre-order here.

After yet another delicious lunch of leftovers –pot roast, potatoes, carrots, celery and mushrooms cobbled together into a stew-like casserole– I realized I haven’t yet gushed about the cooking skills of my new roomie. In the two-plus weeks that we have lived together, he has whipped up:

• Beef Stroganoff with Egg Noodles and Harvest Salad
• Indian Curry with Vegetables and Salmon; Basmati Rice
• Stuffed Pork Chops
• Baked Tilapia and Quinoa with Peppers and Broccoli
• Beer-Can Chicken
• Pot Roast, Potatoes, Carrots, Celery, and Mushrooms cobbled together into a Stew-like Casserole

When and how am I going to start pulling my weight in the kitchen? I always thought I was an okay cook, but B leaves me in the dust. I need some motivation, some new recipes, and oh. . . . some time. Der.

Ideas?:

Bucatini with Mushrooms

Bacon Mac

Cast Iron Burgers (we have a cast iron pot!)

Homemade Caesar Salad

Butterscotch Bars

Uh-oh, I think I uncovered my problem. If I spent all the time I spend blogging or thinking about blogging and surfing the internets, cooking, I would probably make progress. What controversy!

We finally checked out the local breakfast hotspot, Colossal Cafe. I would go on and on about how delicious everything was, but I need to go lie down for a bit. It’s pure insanity. 

Mango Scone and Cinnamon Roll.

Ham, Hash Browns and Swiss Omelet.

Apples, Walnuts and Brie Flappers with Honey and Brown Sugar. 

I’m really fascinated with methods of cooking that I can’t do (i.e. most). I love alternative ovens for instance. Wood fired pizza from ovens like this and this is the most phenomenal thing. Anywho, so in Leh when I lost my friends (Vodafone has no cellphone coverage in Ladakh), I wandered the bazaar finding all these great little alleys with shops selling dried apricots and butchers and grocers. And then I stumbled upon this tiny bread workshop. The three owners were so polite and friendly when explaining to me the bread making process as I stood outside and watched. Which was nice, grumpy bakers don’t really do it for me. They make big batches of dough, rolling them into balls, finger pressing and flattening them. The dough is pressed with a poker against the walls of the coal fired oven which is a literally a hole in the floor. The dough sticks to the sides and when it is ready, slides off easily, freshly baked and ready for sale.

Ladakh was splendid. I have so much to say about my time in the mountains but one or two stories at a time. Everything was so picturesque, it’s a wonder I had time to do anything except take photographs. But I found it so lovely, I didn’t hide behind the lens much at all, instead soaking it all up with my biggest awe-face on.

The place we stayed, a little family run guesthouse called Zeejeed Palace was so cute. In the mornings, our rooms were filled with such glorious light, warming the floral curtains and blankets before we woke up. It had a wonderful flower and vegetable garden. You could literally fall asleep in a cabbage patch. Roses grew beside onion bulbs. Out of sight, the owner’s kids played badminton and squealed. I loved it.

Food was unfortunately not as exciting an affair. The altitude screwed with my digestion in a major way, so much in fact, I had to go on a ‘Digene-diet’, dropping anti acidity pills like beats. But it wasn’t all bad. Apricots from the tree made up for the DIY coffee. I had a phenomenal omelette once for breakfast. The momos were on occasion, incredible, particularly the potato and cheese ones. The traditional Ladakhi dish of ’skyu’ – hand rolled pasta with vegetables was nice too. And our beverage of choice – a hot lemon and honey drink with mint leaves and ginger was delicious, warming our bones on chilly days and nights.

P.S. There are a million accommodation options in Ladakh, ranging from the affordable to the luxurious, so you’re spoilt for choice really. We booked ours through Tenzin Londen of Tibet Trail – tibettrail@gmail.com, who was very prompt and professional. But landing in Leh and shopping around for a place isn’t a bad idea either. If you have any questions, you can always hit me up.

Lots and lots of gorgeous Chanterelle mushrooms, picked on the isle by Friend C.

*

Let’s just say this right up front: Whatever you think about fungus, mushrooms are yummy. If you don’t agree with that statement, you won’t want to read the rest of today’s post.

The isle has a lot of mushrooms. Scotland in general has a lot of mushrooms. I don’t know enough about them to pick them on my own, so I’m am grateful to Friend C. who knows a lot about mushrooms, and almost guaranteed me that the ones she gave me were not false chanterelles (which, for the record, would not make me die, they would just make me hallucinate).

Here is a whole bunch of great information about chanterelles, including a bit about “the trumpet of death,” which I have never had, but which I now want to eat, just because it has such a great name.

Cooking chanterelles is best done very, very simply, because it is easy to overwhelm their delicate flavor (white wine or garlic, for example). Probably the easiest way to cook them is to just saute them in butter. Then serve them over just about anything: chicken or pasta are great choices.

And, like anything else, they are best eaten with friends. Like these were.

Far and fast, s.

*

]]> http://chptr37.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/pg-142-pork-its-whats-for-dinner/ Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:54:42 +0000 SG http://chptr37.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/pg-142-pork-its-whats-for-dinner/

*

One of the things I’ve discovered about myself lately — and this is a new thing — is that I suck at following recipes. I also suck at actually having recipes. And at having ingredients on hand for said recipes.

This never used to be true. When I first started cooking, I had to follow a recipe exactly. I would decide what I was going to make, and then I would go to the store with my shopping list and I would buy each ingredient. If the store didn’t have the ingredient, I would panic and get myself all worked up into a frenzy. I mean, after all, how can you possibly make parsnip, lentil, carrot and pea soup if you can’t find a single pea? Back then, I probably would have started over.

But now, I tend to wing everything I cook. It’s certainly less stressful that way and, surprisingly, things tend to turn out almost as tasty. This week’s ‘wing-it’ recipe involved me looking at my fridge, saying, “Hm, what’s in here?” Of course, it’s not a very big fridge (it’s about a quarter of the size a ‘normal’ fridge), so the answer usually is “hardly anything.”

Here’s what I had in the fridge and cupboard this week:

• Four boneless pork chops
• Garlic cloves
• An onion
• Mushrooms
• Chicken stock
• Parsley
• Potatoes

Here’s what I did with them:

1. Layered the pork chops in flour and fried them in olive oil until the outsides were just cooked and crisped.
2. In a stock pan, sauteed garlic and onions until they were soft, then added the mushrooms, some herbs and salt and pepper.
3. Once the mushrooms were browned, I threw in the chicken stock (just a couple of cups), the chopped parsley, and the pork (which I cut into bite-sized pieces).
4. While the stew simmered (I left it on for about twenty minutes or so, until it was almost the consistency of gravy), I boiled the potatoes. Then I mashed the potatoes with just a bit of milk.

To serve, I made a “bowl” out of the mashed potatoes and then ladled the pork stew into the center of the potatoes. Delish! Perfect for a cold, windy, rainy day. And it made enough for at least four meals, maybe more.

What are you cooking (or eating) these days?

Far and fast, s.

*

“Recipe: A series of step-by-step instructions for preparing with ingredients you forgot to buy, using utensils you don’t own, to make a dish even the dog won’t eat” ~Unknown

]]> http://thisisweeny.com/2009/08/20/pateti/ Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:04:40 +0000 Sheena http://thisisweeny.com/2009/08/20/pateti/

Pateti marks Parsi New Year and like all good auspicious occasions, food is pivotal to celebration. So for lunch yesterday, we went to Zamu’s, a Pune restaurant owned and run by a couple of my friends for a traditional patra lunch. The set meal included dishes like sali gosht which is a chicken curry with potato crisps and great lamb, beer battered chicken, breads and rotis and a delicious mutton pulao all served on a banana leaf for a plate plus bottomless beer and an eggy custard for dessert.

Buses mostly remind me that I can’t drive so I sort of resent them. But the nice intercity ones aren’t so bad, air-conditioning, reclining seats, rest stops where you get great fragrant chai and vendors hopping on board occasionally to sell snacks. Like this dashing young man selling peanuts. Sweet, warm, just boiled peanut kernels to be exact. A bus journey doesn’t cut the mustard without. He posed for a picture and convinced me to buy two cones. 

chips, glorious chips.

straight from our garden to my plate.

yum yum yum.

(thank you gaz!)

Have you ever listened to The Splendid Table, on National Public Radio? If so, you know there’s this wonderful section where listeners phone in and they try to stump the host by telling her what’s in their fridge. She then has to make a meal out of it. I used to listen to The Splendid Table a lot when I still had a real job (read: a forty-minute commute each way to the newspaper office and back), and I never once heard her get stumped, even when you knew that callers were making up the stuff in their fridge just to be jerks. “Hm… let’s see, I have half a week-old lemon wrapped in fish skin, a jar of my Aunt Elda’s rhubarb-chili marmalade and some soft-boiled grouse eggs.” And she wouldn’t even blink. She would just go, “hmm.. well if you marinate the eggs in the marmalade, and then wrap them in the fish skin and throw them in the oven for about twenty minutes at 400 degrees, and then use the lemon rind as a seasoning…”

As awed as I am by her ability to make anything out of nothing, I don’t have that trait. Instead, I turn to the Internet. Last night I typed in “pork” + “basil” because I had a lot of both, and last time the basil lasted for about a day before it was covered in mites, and so using this one as soon as possible seemed like a rather fine idea.

The search brought up Pad Ga-Prao, a quick and easy Thai dish made with holy basil and chopped pork. Neither of which I had. But I decided to wing it any way, since I happened to have eggs and rice. You can see the original recipe here, if you’re not willing to try my half-assed version. But I will tell you that the outcome was fantastic (and the ingredients will make two meals, fyi)

Ingredients:

• Olive Oil
• Four cloves of garlic, diced
• Red pepper flakes, chili powder, curry spices or some combination of the above, depending on how spicy you like your food
• Red and yellow peppers, sliced in long thin strips
• Two pork chops, also sliced in thin strips
• Soy sauce and sugar
• 2 eggs
• Rice
• Fresh basil

Directions:

1. Start the rice. If you don’t know how to make rice, don’t ask me, because I suck at it.
2. Heat the oil in a pan on med-high heat. Add the garlic and spices and stir until browned.
3. Add the peppers. Stir and cook until just a little soft.
4. Add the pork, a couple dashes of soy sauce, and a pinch of sugar. Stir and cook.
5. While the pork is cooking, fry the eggs in a separate pan.
   
6. Just before you’re ready to eat, drop the basil leaves in and stir until they’re wilted.
   
7. Throw the rice on a plate, add the egg on one side and the pork-mixture on the other.
8. Eat. Say “mmmmm” with your mouth full. If you make it as spicy as I did, have water handy.
   

Far and fast, and full of food, s.

*

“We seek excellence by constant trial and error.” ~Master Jin Kwon

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