Archives

I just wanted to give you all a heads up that I plan on redesigning my website. I actually like the current look and layout pretty well, but this is more of a technical need for me. For the more technically inclined, I use Drupal as my platform, but I just haven't had the time or technical know-how to address things that aren't exactly working well on my blog. I plan to move to Wordpress which is an easier blogging system to use (and recently much improved with their 2.5 2.6 version), and should provide me with as much capability that I've been utilizing with Drupal, but in a simpler way.

We rarely buy a loaf of bread. Sometimes we do, and we'll buy variations of bread - like hot dog buns or bagels. But your standard loaf of bread is typically made at home. It's cheaper, very easy, and tastes just as good if not better. It's also nice to control and know exactly what is going into our bread.

But back to the easy part. We have a bread machine. That's why we can get away with making it all the time. Sure, that no-knead bread is an easy substitute, but if you want to throw all of your ingredients in and press the start button, and then a few hours later discover that you have a loaf of bread - well, that's the easiest type of homemade bread you can get.

This loaf of bread is somewhere in between the easier and easy.

I recently had a hankerin' for some cherries. I am not usually a cherry kind of girl, but when they're in season I'll indulge in a pound or two. If you get a perfectly ripe cherry, you'll get a perfectly sweet and spicy flavor - too soon and it will be tart (not my favorite), too late, well it will just be too late.

After gorging myself, I decided that I needed to do something else with them. What I wound up with was a variation on (or very much inspired by) apple crisp.

Ever since I saw what this month's challenge would be with the Daring Bakers, I kept trying to decide if I would do it or not. It wasn't so much because it was challenging and time consuming. It was more about the fact that I've already gained a couple of pounds recently and it was clear this was going to be a calorie-filled pastry. Sure, I can share my creations with other people, but usually my husband and I willingly devour what we make.

For the last three years or so we have done container gardening. It isn't quite the same as doing regular gardening where you have your own land, but it is a decent substitute. We usually grow about a million tomatoes (slight exaggeration), and a few other random items. This year we're trying to grow artichokes, have successfully grown radishes and turnips (more on that in a future post), and strawberries.

Another thing we grow, but never manage to use all of, is basil. It is probably one of the absolute easiest things to grow, but we rarely take full advantage of it since there is so much of it.

Ah, summer. It seems that we've finally gotten there. With 100+ degree days in spring, it kind of makes wonder what to expect for the next few months. If it's anything hotter than what we've had so far, I am not sure that I want to be turning on the stove - or at least for very long.

It has been amazingly hot here in New York City. "Heat wave" doesn't even do it justice. It has only been yesterday and today that we've seen a reprieve from 100+ degree weather - today was high 80s, and tomorrow promises to be a cool 82 degrees.

A couple of weeks ago, however, when the weather was more tolerable I spent some time in front of a hot stove and made some Indian food. While I've made food from other cuisines like Chinese, Mexican, and Italian, I've rarely made Indian food, aside from that mango lassi I made in February. Perhaps I've been too intimidated by it - the exotic spices, the unusual breads, the aromas... The whole cuisine is almost other-worldly.

Back when my husband and I tried the raw food diet for a month we wound up making a lot of food from scratch that we might have normally purchased at a store. One of those things was almond milk. At first making this sort of thing was truly intimidating, but once done we realized how easy it could be. Prep time is minutes, although twiddling your thumbs takes hours.

As an average baker, it was a little overwhelming to see The Daring Bakers' latest challenge. As a vegan, it was absolutely frightening. Two words: Opera Cake. Don't know what an Opera Cake is? Well, essentially it is a lot of layers of cake and cream and sugar topped off with a glaze. If you're lucky it will take approximately four hours to construct, and if you're good it will look perfect when cut.

And why was this frightening for me as a vegan? Well, aside from the necessary endurance factor, it had around 14 eggs in the original recipe (six of those are egg whites, so if you want to get really technical...). It was pretty clear that this cake depends heavily upon our fine feathered friends. But what is a challenge if it is not challenging?!

Our wedding was unconventional. We didn't want to have the cookie cutter wedding that so many people seem to have these days. Instead, my husband suggested, why don't we do a picnic? That seemed like an interesting idea, and one that eventually caught on.

Our wedding was in Central Park near the Bow Bridge. We had everyone sit in a circle on blankets, and after we got settled we had everyone share advice and stories for us. Eventually we expressed how we felt about each other (a.k.a. vows), and then had everyone eat snacks and desserts out of our picnic baskets (really galvanized buckets, but they still looked really nice). Aside from occasional bits of rain, it was nice and it was nice to do something that was more simple and less stressful than a full blown wedding.