Tonight Phil and I leave for Seattle to start our bike adventure. I have been busy training (falling while attached to my clip pedals), moving and partying it up before I leave. I have a book of postcard stamps and I’m not afraid to use ‘em, so if you want a postcard, please e-mail me your address (email is found on the about page).
Of course, I’m looking forward to this trip, but a little scared. The thought of biking about 800 miles is pretty nutty right now and I’m sure it will seem even crazier after our first day of biking. We’ll be leaving Seattle and biking to Portland on July 1st - wish me luck!!
Gather some friends for a weekend at a farmhouse and you get good times, fire, lots of booze and tons of food. A big star was this chocolate cake/brownie concoction that we had for dessert on Saturday night with some vanilla icecream. Have you ever had whipping cream not whip? We went through two containers of heavy whipping cream that was just not feeling it. I think the chocolate saved the dessert, but the (non)whipping cream was just baffling. The recipe for the cake below is from Saveur and I didn’t change a thing. OK, I didn’t have super high quality chocolate or butter, but the thing was still amazing. When searching for “brownie†on Saveur a recipe popped up with this description: “bearing a strong resemblance to a rich, dense, gooey brownie, this dessert takes the cake.†SOLD! A very unfussy and delicious recipe, I highly recommend it as an elegant alternative to brownies.
Fire! Fire! Fire!
Make Yr Own Bloody Mary
The farmhouse was also filled with ladybugs - lucky, right?
Marie José’s Chocolate Cake
Ingredients:
14 1/2 tbsp. European-style high-butterfat butter (I used regular salted butter)
3 tbsp. flour
7 oz. quality bittersweet chocolate, chopped into small
pieces (I used bittersweet baker’s chocolate squares)
3/4 cup sugar
5 eggs, at room temperature, separated
To Do
Preheat oven to 350°. Grease a 9″ glass pie dish with 1/2 tbsp. of the butter, dust with 1 tbsp. of the flour, tapping out excess, and set aside. Cut remaining butter into small pieces. Melt butter and chocolate together in a medium bowl set over a pot of simmering water over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon. Remove bowl from heat and stir in sugar, then the remaining flour, then the egg yolks, stirring until well combined. Set aside to let cool briefly.
Meanwhile, beat egg whites in a medium mixing bowl with an electric mixer on medium-high speed until soft peaks form, 2–3 minutes. Using a rubber spatula, fold one-third of the egg whites at a time into chocolate mixture. Pour batter into prepared pie pan.
Bake cake until a toothpick inserted in center comes out with some moist crumbs still attached (cake will rise and top will crack as it bakes, then collapse on itself as it cools), 30 minutes. Transfer cake to a wire rack to let cool briefly. Serve warm or at room temperature, with ice cream, if you like. [Ice cream is essential!]
There is a fantastic article from Epicurious that is all about food and traveling through the different regions of Portugal, my family’s homeland. My mom is from a little town called “Chipar de Cima” and my dad is from Lisbon. We have family all over the place in the country. When I was little, we used to go to Portugal every summer. School would let out and we would get on a plane and spend three months with my mother’s parents and other family members. Portugal is where I milked cows, witnessed chickens getting their necks wrung in the yard and pigs being caught in the driveway and slaughtered, picked strawberries and vegetables for dessert and dinner and learned the wonders of Parmalait. It was a pretty great way to spend a childhood summer - we would go to the beach every day, I learned to ride a motorcycle, read books voraciously and actually knew how to speak Portuguese for a while (very rusty now).
The Epicurious article is spot-on about a lot of what is fantastic about Portuguese food - fresh, no-nonsense and simple food. The focus at my grandmother’s was always fresh ingredients, good olive oil and kitchen knowledge that was not based on any cooking book. I recently got my mother this Portuguese cookbook, which she loves because it has many of the recipes of her childhood written down with exact measurements. My grandma uses her senses in order to tell her when the dough is ready for breadbaking or a cake batter is set enough to go in the oven. My mom jokes that I’m just like her in that explaining how I made some Portuguese sweetbread last year, I would say “just throw a handful of flour in the batter until it looks right.” That’s fine by me.
Anyways, Portuguese food is pretty awesome. If you live in NYC, a great restuarant to try is Alfama.
Since I’ve been getting a lot of hits on it lately, a link to my Portuguese Custard Cups recipe.
We didn’t make it out to the swamp. Phil has created a more detailed description of our trip, but here’s the quick version.
In four days Phil and I managed to read on the beach with swimsuits on in 80-something degree weather, have a bite in a Christian-themed cafe, camp in a rain-soaked state park outside of Raleigh’s national airport for an evening, hike the lovely Cox Trail at Eno River State Park, get some confused directions another state park (almost causing brain seizures on our end), set up tent in front of a prime piece of lake real estate, hit up 2 wineries and a B&B and ate dinner atop a mountain blanketed with iced covered trees and snow. Lots of extremes.
A little crazy, a lot of adventuring and map trickery and quite a bit of fun in retrospect.
During Hurrican Fran, the river rose over this footbridge!
The mighty neptune holding a pissed off tortoise.
Phil and I are leaving the city just as it warms up and heading to even hotter climes. Virginia Beach and South Carolina for some resting and fun times. One look at my nice kitchen nook of cabinets and shelves before I head to the wilds of Congaree Swamp National Park and some campfire cooking.
This post is not about basketball. More like how crazy March is and I’m only in the second week. This weekend MiG had a show on Friday (thanks Jenny!) and then a house party in D.C. which didn’t end until the wee hours of the morning. The morning in which time “sprung” forward. I am exhausted. Thanks a lot to Matt for hosting the party and letting us crash on his floor and Berg for putting it together. Both shows were a lot of fun, but house parties are my favorite places to play. People lose their inhibitions a bit more (could be the free-flowing booze) and are just friendlier before, during and after a set. Nothing great to report on the food front. I was going to take pictures and describe things I ate while on the road for a short while, but it wasn’t worth it. A real tour will warrant some interesting food tidbits, but this jaunt was too short.
Got home and wanted something sweet so I whipped up some chocolate and butterscotch cookies with applesauce subbing in for butter. They came out great. Not too chocolately or heavy, just enough to satisfy a sweet craving. No recipe because I have no idea what the measurements were. I eyeballed the whole thing. There was some wheat pastry flour, regular AP flour, applesauce, a capful of oil, a handful of butterscotch chips, oh and oatmeal, cocoa powder, a bit of brown and white sugar and baking soda. Baking is a science that I sometimes don’t have patience with.
For those of you who wish to experience the rest of the world, but simply don’t have the time or money, I suggest checking out some of Simonica’s travel photos. I think they’re in the thousands now and they are beautiful and fun and make you want to go to Italy NOW.
Canoe camping is seriously the way to go folks. Sometimes it means a daunting paddle ride against the wind with some crazy choppy lake conditions to your campsite, but the important thing to remember that it’s YOUR campsite on a private island or peninsula. One word: awesome.
While the weather wasn’t entirely agreeable, we made the best of it. After the crazy paddle to get to the site before the rain really started coming down on Saturday, it was smooth sailing…I mean canoeing, all the way. At least the drizzle kept the bugs away and maybe bears too.
Everything also tastes better when you cook it on a campfire and eat outside. The aforementioned Hazlenut Cornmeal pancakes and bannock were made and were really tasty.
The cornmeal pancakes didn’t come out like pancakes (I think I added too much water to the mix), but this was super delicious. I call it Hazlenut Cornmeal Hash instead.
We ate the hash with a luscious baked apple drizzled with whiskey honey….mmmmmm
Likewise, we tried making the bannock on a stick, but ended up making a tinfoil tray for our grill and creating a more biscuit-like substance.
They were still really good with our eggs on Monday morning.
Oh, and of course the actual lake itself - I got so excited by that patch of blue sky.
The site in all of its glory.
This Labor Day Weekend shall be spent camping, no matter what you do Ernesto! Our reservation for a site at Indian Lake was made a month ago and “possible showers” will not deter me from cooking round a campfire. I demand s’mores! And Jiffy-Pop!
Other ambitious campfire meals include one for Hazelnut Cornmeal Pancakes first found in Backpacker Magazine. Apparently, it is an updated recipe from Lewis and Clark’s little jaunt through America a while back. The other campfire goodness will come in the form of bannock - I have no clue how this will turn out. There will be pictures.
This past weekend I got to take a mini-vacation. Man in Gray had a gig in the lovely city of Montreal, so me, Phil, Jared and Steph headed up there tout suite in order to get some delicious food and drink into our bellies before the show on Saturday night. Despite the fact that the band we were supposed to be sharing equipment with never showed up, we managed to have a kickass rocknroll show. A big thanks to Julien for setting up the show, finding us amps and a drumkit and being the sweetest guy ever (with the cutest french accent!). On Sunday, I got up to an amazing breakfast (if going to Montreal, stay at this place or this place if you want comfy/affordable rooms and fantastique home-cooked breakfasts) and hit up the Marché Jean-Talon. Phil and I had really wanted to hit up the Marché Atwater, but all went well as I got the STINKIEST cheese, a Val de Weiss munster, (an Alsace Munster washed in beer) from a cheese-monger at Jean-Talon. How stinky? Let’s put it this way, the cheese was plastic wrapped in its own wooden container, then put into a ziplock bag and then into one of those keep cool/hot bags and was kept in the back of the car whereby whenever the car jolted a bit, the smell of stanky fromage nearly killed the passengers. I tried it last night and it was delightful! Not as scary as the smell. The next time I go to Montreal I will get even more smelly, runny and delicious cheeses and spend more time relaxing and drinking wine and eating chocolates. Two short days are not enough to do that city justice.
Steph was probably contemplating on which amazing chocolate to try with the wine.
Rockin at L’Esco.
This lettuce smelled so good in the sun - take my word for it.
So much cheese!!
At this point, I think Phil was hiding from the stank cheese and I caught him behind bananas.