lemon sorbet

Like most of the country, Portland is experiencing a massive heatwave this week. But unlike my friends and family on the east coast, most Pacific Northwesterners (including us) don't have central A/C. So for two weeks every summer we collectively roast in our homes, saying things like "be careful what you wish for" and "I hope the neighbors can't see me standing naked in front of this fan right now." It's not pretty. But this year we were prepared. We went to the store on Monday and bought a window A/C unit for our bedroom and the ingredients for a lemon sorbet. If lemonade is the perfect summer drink, lemon sorbet is the perfect summer dessert - especially when the temps get into the triple digits.

The recipe only yielded 2 and 1/2 cups, so I doubled it. It kind of defeats the purpose if the heatwave lasts longer than the sorbet, right? Right. I ended up needing 6 lemons to get 2 cups of lemon juice, which I ran through a fine mesh strainer before mixing with the simple syrup.

After the mixture reached 40 degrees it was time to put it in the ice cream machine. Oh, how I love this part. The freezing took approximately 25 minutes, after which I put the sorbet into a bowl and let it harden for a bit in the freezer.

Yuuuuummmmm. With a handful of cut strawberries (half store bought, half from our garden) this was such a tasty and refreshing dessert. It's going to be even hotter today so we'll definitely be having this again tonight. And tomorrow night...

fourth of july recap

Our 4^th of July went something like this...

1. wake up at the crack of dawn to run 13.1 miles around Sauvie Island
2. celebrate another successful race with pancakes, bacon, and coffee
3. attempt to nap
4. prep food for the block party
5. sit down whenever possible
6. limp outside to join neighbors in games, eating, and drinking
7. make sure Rocco doesn’t bark at the babies
8. take Rocco back inside after he barked at a baby
9. eat more, drink more
10. watch fireworks
11. move to backyard for firepit and smores
12. deplete any remaining energy while attempting to stay awake past midnight
13. blissfully fail at #12 and crawl into bed

Tired yet?  Yeah, me too.  So let’s get to the good stuff... the food!

Odd numbered houses were tasked with making sides (the even numbered houses got desserts) so I made our default pasta salad – Giada’s Antipasto Salad.  Not knowing how many people were going to attend and how much the other houses were making, I made about 5 times more than I needed to and will now be eating pasta salad for 3 meals a day for the next week.

We had the opposite problem with our other side dish – deep fried pickles.  If you’ve never had deep fried pickles, you haven’t really lived.  Honestly.  They’re worth buying a deep fryer for.  I’ve had them at restaurants and they’re never as good as homemade.  Many restaurants take the pickle slice approach, which is a shame because the spears are hands down the way to go.  But the home deep fryer also makes things less greasy than what you find at restaurants or state fairs… I don’t know why that is, but it makes me feel a little less guilty.  (We figure it’s a slippery slope from deep fryer purchase to The Biggest Loser, so when Jared and I bought the deep fryer we pinky swore that we’d only use it 2-3 times a year and we’ve stuck to it.  Yes, we pinky swear.  We also pass each other notes, talk in secret code, and promise to be bffs 4ever.  You don’t do that with your significant other?  Oh.  Damn.)  Anyway, the thing about the pickles is that each time we make them I swear I’m going to take pictures, and then the whole batch gets eaten before I can even get the lens cap off.  This time was sadly no different.  But in case you’re curious, they pretty much looked like this:

At one point in the evening there were several people holding a deep fried pickle in one hand and Jared’s home brew in the other, which was pretty awesome.  I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it on here before, but my husband has become a pretty avid home brewer over the past couple years.  So when an email went out to see what people could bring to the block party, I volunteered a keg of Jared’s beer.  It was sort of like the marriage equivalent of taking the training wheels off your kid’s bike and hoping like hell they don’t curse your name as they’re being carted off in an ambulance.  Thankfully, his beer was a rousing success (duh!) and before we knew it, Jared’s was the first keg finished and he breathed a massive sigh of relief.  I did, too, it was just drowned out by the groaning that occurred every time I had to move.

Bakerella's Congo Bars (and why they're worth the blisters)

We got invited over to our next door neighbors' house Friday night for a BBQ, which gave me the excuse I'd been looking for (i.e. desperately hoping for) to make the Congo Bar recipe Bakerella posted last month.

She gave two options for mixing the batter - stand mixer or by hand.  She tried it both ways and said the hand mixing approach turned out better.  I sure hope she's right because by the time I was done mixing the super thick batter I had multiple blisters on my right hand.  But, as the title of this post suggests, the blisters were totally worth the delicious goodness that came out of the oven.

Holy mama!  I promise you, they taste even better than they look.  As Bakerella notes in her post, they took much longer than 30 minutes to cook through... probably more like 40.  But, man oh man were they good.  I'm debating making them again with Rolos.  Aaaaaaaaaand now I'm hungry.

super yummy strawberry ice cream

Among the many DIY activities that take place in my house, making homemade ice cream has to be my favorite. If you've never tried it, it's much easier than you'd think. We ascribe to the Alton Brown approach as the base for pretty much all our ice creams, so when I came across this recipe for strawberry ice cream (Jared's favorite) I knew I'd have to alter it a bit. I ended up with a hybrid of the two - the ice cream base from Alton Brown, and the strawberries and syrup from Recipe Zaar: made by bird's super yummy strawberry ice cream:

• Strawberries & Syrup:
  • 1 pint fresh strawberries, hulled and chopped (chop them a bit finer if you have sensitive teeth, otherwise the bigger strawberry chunks will be too cold for your teeth when you're eating the ice cream)
  • 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
  • 1/4 cup sugar
• Ice Cream:
  • 3 cups half-and-half
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 8 large egg yolks
  • 9 ounces vanilla sugar (I know vanilla sugar might seem a little unnecessary, but it's so worth it.)
  • 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

Several of the comments on FoodNetwork.com for Alton's recipe say that 8 eggs is way too many and make the ice cream too custard-like. I don't know who these people are and I don't know what they're talking about. The texture of the ice cream is beyond perfect (in the humble opinion of this ice cream super fan.) Anyway... I followed Alton's recipe and - without adding the strawberries - started churning the vanilla ice cream in the ice cream maker.

I made the strawberries and syrup the night before (the recipe says to make it only an hour before but life got in the way - thankfully the mixture was still good the next day!)

As much as I wanted to eat/drink the strawberry goodness, will power took over and the mixture made it safely into the ice cream maker. (At this point, I'd say the vanilla ice cream had been churning for 5-10 minutes and had just started to get thick. You could probably mix them beforehand, I was just experimenting with the timing.)

It was right about here that I knew this was going to be heavenly. I let it churn for another 20-30 minutes ("checking" it with a few or 5 spoonfuls along the way), then divided it into two air-tight bowls, covered the soft ice cream with wax paper, put the tops on, and waited approximately 4 minutes for it to harden before "checking" it again. You know, just to make sure it was freezing properly.

I have absolutely no idea what I ate for dinner that night... something insignificant compared to what was awaiting me for dessert. The hardened ice cream was well worth the wait (the whole half hour since my last spoonful.)

Enjoy!

supersized strawberry shortcake

My friend Sarah's (insert very low number here) birthday was last week, and we decided the best way to celebrate would be to put on some folksy western garb and head on down to the Little Red Hen.  If you live in Seattle and have never been there, I highly recommend it.  As long as you don't want your food right away or mind walking to the bar for your drinks.  I felt like a southern style cake was in order, and nothing says southern summer quite like strawberry shortcake.  Or I just really like strawberry shortcake.  Either way, I settled on this recipe and subbed out the butter cake for the yellow cake recipe Bakerella swears by.

First, the yellow cake - I poured the batter into two cake rounds instead of three, which greatly increased the bake time and the density of the cake.  It was a little too dense for my general liking (I tend to prefer light and fluffy), but for strawberry shortcake it was PERFECT!  With this kind of cake, light and fluffy would have collapsed under all the strawberry and cream goodness.

Second, the strawberry tallcake.  Holy moly.  I think the best thing about this recipe is that it couldn't have been easier to make and looks insanely impressive once it's all put together.  I made the cakes the night before, and whipped (no pun intended) it all together the next day in about a half an hour.  And on top of all that, it tasted SO good.  Just look how happy the birthday girl was to eat it!

the mapron

Not long after Jared and I moved in together, I knew I had to convince him to start wearing an apron.  See, he does most of the cooking and I do the laundry… which means I spend a lot of time standing in front of the washer fighting a never ending battle with the food stains on his clothes.  Don’t get me wrong, I know how lucky I am to have a husband that cooks dinner for me every night.  I just wish it wouldn’t end up on his shirts.  Hence, the need for an apron, or in his case - a mapron.  His preference was for one that was the complete opposite of my girly Anthropologie apron, so I went with basic black using Kwik Sew 3613.  The pattern couldn’t have been easier, but the apron on its own was a little boring so I busted out the Yudu and screen printed a grungy looking cutlery design on the front.

ho-ho-homemade buttercream frosting!

Oh cupcakes... is there anything better? No, especially if we're talking holiday cupcakes. Earlier today I decided to whip up some cupcakes for a holiday party we were going to this afternoon and after a quick Flickr search, decided to put my own spin on these.   I used Betty Crocker Devil's Food cake mix, and instead of store frosting I experimented with making my own buttercream frosting.  The first recipe I used was too sweet and almost glaze-like (which the reviews would have told me had I bothered to read them), so Jared and I hustled to the co-op down the street to get more butter and I tried for round 2, this time using a slightly different, much more positively reviewed recipe.  It tasted SO good, and with a bit of green food coloring the frosting was done.  (By the way, I had never previously looked into what was involved in making your own frosting, but it's surprisingly super easy.  If you can make cupcakes from a mix, you can definitely make your own frosting.)

Instead of using my standard knife to cupcake approach, I loaded the frosting into a Ziploc bag, snipped off a small corner, and tried my hand at piping the frosting onto the cupcakes.  It probably would have been easier to use a pastry bag and piping tip, but in a pinch I think the Ziploc baggy worked pretty well.  To finish off the cupcakes I sprinkled them with crushed candy canes and stuck each one with a mini candy cane.

the bird is the word

Thanksgiving in our house this year was far less stressful due to one essential addition to our appliance arsenal: The Big Easy Infrared Turkey Fryer from Char-Broil.  I was skeptical when Jared first told me about it, but after he tested it out with a small chicken a couple weeks ago, I knew he was on to something.  In addition to cooking perfectly juicy poultry in half the time of a normal oven, using the fryer this year meant one important thing: a free oven ALL DAY.  All of you who've attempted the chaos of trying to perfectly time all of your Thanksgiving dishes without a double oven - put this fryer on your Christmas list.

And here's the delicious turkey Jared cooked:

We tried a new stuffing this year, Tyler Florence's Carmelized Onion and Cornbread Stuffing, and it was a big hit! Easily one of the best stuffings I've ever had. We couldn't find cornbread muffins, so we used an 8x8 tin of cornbread from Whole Foods instead, and it worked great.  Some of the reviews on Food Network said the stuffing turned out too dry, so I added a few extra splashes of heavy cream and stock just in case.

For dessert we had Martha Stewart's Old Fashioned Apple Pie and Sarah brought down a couple dozen of her famous cupcakes as a belated b-day/thanksgiving treat.  The most popular were the carrot with cream cheese frosting, and classic yellow cake with chocolate fudge icing (honestly, if there's a better cupcake on earth I have yet to find it.)  Sarah even made custom cupcake picks for the occasion using paper punches and her own little bird template.  Let me know if you'd be interested in a tutorial and I'll ask her to put one together.

For more food pics from our yummy little Thanksgiving dinner click here.

Thanksgiving weekend coming to an end can only mean two things: 1) running, yoga, and pilates are all very much in order, and 2) I have less than a month to finish a long list of Christmas crafts. Ack!

holy stromboli

We made homemade pizza a few weeks ago and had some leftover dough to use up, so I went on the hunt for a good Stromboli recipe.  Jared had somehow made it through 20+ years in NJ/NY without ever having the deliciousness that is Stromboli. Very strange.  Anyway, I decided to go with this recipe, courtesy of one of my favorite blogs: Serious Eats.  We nixed the peppers, and used salami instead of pepperoni, but OH MY did this thing turn out good.  It was one of those meals that after every bite you feel it necessary to declare how good it tastes, high-fiving one another after every 3^rd bite or so for possessing such culinary brilliance.  Honestly, it was that good.

We only had ½ the dough required for the recipe, so we made 1 roll instead of 2, and halved all the other ingredients.  1 roll ended up being plenty for 2 people, and I even had a little bit leftover to take for lunch the next day.  I highly recommend trying this out, because it’s really much easier than you’d expect.  Oh, and here’s the pizza dough recipe we used.  Only tip I have is to make your “well” in the flour fairly wide.  We tried a volcano approach and ended up breaching the flour walls, resulting in an oily mess all over our kitchen counter and floor.  The second time around, we made the well about 5 inches in diameter and that worked much better.

Happy eating!