Category: Experimental

Posted on

1.11.2015 | TI8

SUNDAY I ATE

Breakfast: Pancakes with syrup and applesauce
Morning Snack: Pancake sandwiches with penuche frosting and chocolate chips. This was a spur-of-the-moment decision as there were some leftover pancakes just sitting there at the same time Suzanne decided that a batch of frosting wasn’t properly spreadable and decided to make another. These were fantastic.
pancake frosting sandwich
Lunch: Leftover pizza rolls
Afternoon snack: Hot cocoa. Coke zero.
Dinner: Burger stuffed with gorgonzolla, topped with saute’d onions and in a bun made from the pizza roll recipe. I tried something I’ve wanted to do for a while: cook the stuffed burgers sous vide. It was a successful experiment, but I should have charred them more at the end.
I also added some mozarella to try to bind the blue cheese, and that was wholly successful.
stuffed burger sous vide
Dessert: The photo version of the banana blondies with penuche frosting for Flourarrangements

Posted on

7.20.2014 | TI8

SUNDAY I ATE

Breakfast: Grapenuts with cranberry juice and fresh strawberries.

Lunch: Roast beef sandwich with bbq sauce

Afternoon snack: Watermellon at the pool. Thank you summer!

Dinner:  Pork tenderloin with Yuki’s apple sauce and green bean and tomato salad

Dessert: Nectarine cake that Suzanne tried out for the first time. Great.

Posted on

7.13.2014 | TI8

SUNDAY I ATE

Breakfast: Grapenuts with cranberry juice

Lunch: Turkey sandwich with avocado, ripe tomato, and some really spicy hummus

Afternoon snack: Ice cream. From Smitten Ice Cream.

smitten ice cream

Wow. This place is crazy. They individually mix up your ice cream in a couple of minutes using special mixers and liquid nitrogen. It really gets a wonderful consistency… just past that super soft, just out of the churn stage, so you can actually scoop it up. The salted caramel was great, the brown sugar and cinnamon was so good I thought I was eating an apple pie (apparently, no apple. Turns out, I really think the ice cream is the critical flavor in apple pie). The mint chip, sadly, was just a touch disappointing. It’s made with fresh mint, which was cool, and all, but it came across as just a bit too earthy. I’ve made my own ice cream with fresh mint and thought I’d just done something wrong, but apparently that’s just the flavor. I like my mint ice cream almost like a tic-tac where it takes your breath away and the chocolate is the mellowing influence. 

I was all over the N2 ice cream machines, though. In a way, it’s a sign of my own failure as a gadgeteer. I used to make a lot of liquid nitrogen ice cream in graduate school… whenever there was a big party, we’d always fire it up. And I was always disappointed. It was a great schtick, and it impressed the hell out of visitors, but the ice cream was always too fluffy from too much vigorous stirring, by turns soupy and icy, and never as good as what I’d make with rock salt and a churn. I just assumed that was what it was… but this Smitten person looked beyond the problems and saw something beautiful and made it so. I’m so impressed, I didn’t even cringe at the price ($6 for a standard dish)… hot ticket: buy a pint for $11 and share with 4.

Dinner:  Sloppy Joes. On the brioche rolls. Damn good. I followed a recipe from The Pioneer Woman, and it was pretty good. Only thing was it was just a bit too sweet. I’d skip the optional tomato paste, or maybe 1 Tbls of brown sugar next time.

 

Posted on

7.12.2014 | TI8

SATURDAY I ATE

Breakfast: Doughnuts from All Star Doughnuts in El Cerrito

Lunch: Roast beef and rocket attempt. This is the first time I tried since our trip to Friday Harbor. Since Laurie at Market Chef casually mentioned a bunch of things that weren’t in my earlier attempts (like mayonnaise and lemon juice) I had pretty high hopes for this one. The sauce was much, much closer to the original; close enough to make me really suspect that the prepared horseradish from Trader Joe’s is just kinda not that good. It has the smell like it’s going to bite, but then, even with a ton of it dumped in, it just sort of whimpers on the tongue. I need to try something better. I also need to roast my own beef. Not that the packaged stuff is bad, but I always feel like that’s a place to improve. The bread here is the brioche bun that Suzanne has been making every day for 2 weeks while she tries to figure out how to stop them from cracking. This one didn’t solve that problem, but cracking doesn’t stop it being delicious. The rocket, at least, is fresh from the garden, natch.

2014-07-11 08.10.37

Dinner:  Pizza from Little Star.

 

Posted on

6.17.2014 | TI8

TUESDAY I ATE

Breakfast: Grapenuts with cranberry juice

Lunch: Turkey and cranberry sandwich from Specialties

Afternoon snack:  Chocolate chip cookie

Dinner: Leftover risotto and salad from the garden

Dessert: Experimental double chocolate chip pinenut cookies. Oh, and some apricot pie. With ice cream.

Posted on

6.2.2014 | TI8

MONDAY I ATE:

Breakfast: Grapenuts with cranberry juice

Lunch: Roast-beef sandwich on salted caraway seed bun. I miss a whole lot of things about our old home in Friday Harbor. One of them is the “Roast Beef and Rocket” sandwich from The Market Chef. This was a perfect combination of flavors: thinly sliced rare roast beef, crisp arugula, a salty caraway-seed bun, and a tangy horseradish sauce. (It should be noted that the original version of this sandwich also includes some sort of olive tapenade… since I think olives are nasty, I always suffered the withering stares at the counter as I ordered it without). But here’s the rub: I can’t figure out the horseradish sauce. Suzanne surmised that it is probably sour cream and horseradish. I’ve tried it 3 times now, using prepared horseradish. The first time, it was bland, the second time I added more horseradish sauce, but that made it runny and gross. This time I set the horseradish on a paper towel to drain before adding. This got the texture right, but it was back to being bland. I’m thinking of looking  for some sort of dried horseradish powder so I can just keep dumping it in until it has a real bite. Fortunately, I’m going back to Friday Harbor in a couple of weeks and can try out a couple “RBR-no olives” from the source.

Afternoon snack: Chocolate chip cookie from Bittersweet. After eating my poor imitation of the roast beef and rocket sandwich, I started thinking more about The Market Chef. The sandwiches are good and all, but the chocolate chip cookies are something else. They have just the right balance of crunchy outer skin with a chewy matrix holding the chips and an unusually bold caramel tinge that I love.  I would often structure my day so that any errands I needed to do for work got done at cookie time. Bittersweet has pretty good cookies, to. As might be expected, their chocolate chips are out of this world, but their dough is inconsistent. Today was one of the good days; they were caramel-y and chewy, though the dough was thinner than  the chips, which isn’t my preference. So, a distant second choice compared to my favorites 1,500 miles away, but still made for a great afternoon.

Dinner: Mac-n-cheese. Always a crowd pleaser.

Dessert: Jelly doughnut cake… Suzanne has been experimenting with this one based on pins like this. Pretty much nailed it:

Jelly doughnut cake fail

Posted on

5.31.2014 | TI8

SATURDAY I ATE:

Breakfast: Chocolate-Chocolate Chip pancakes from The Joy of Cooking. Except that I only added the egg yolks because I mis-read the recipe and had already thrown out the whites. Frankly, this whole separating eggs for breakfast food is bullshit. Seriously. Maybe it makes whatever you’re make a bit fluffier. Maybe it gets you props around America’s Test Kitchen. But for the rest of us, it gets an extra bowl or two dirty, it takes time, and it really doesn’t change the outcome much. I not only didn’t separate them, I threw the whites away, and the pancakes were pretty good.

Lunch: Turkey sandwich with salami and guacamole

Afternoon snack: More of that experimental doughnut thing

Dinner: Leftover pasta

Dessert: More of that experimental doughnut thing

Posted on

5.30.2014 | TI8

FRIDAY I ATE:

Breakfast: Grapenuts with cranberry juice

Lunch: Leftover pulled pork

Afternoon snack: The usual. Some candy and a Coke Zero.

Dinner: Pasta with lemon and artichoke hearts from “I wish I Could Eat  Pasta Every Night”

Dessert: Experimental custard filled donut cake. The Bismarck. Color me Happy.

Posted on

5.27.2014 | TI8

TUESDAY I ATE:

Breakfast: Grapenuts with cranberry juice

Lunch: Leftover pulled pork

Afternoon snack: A few minty M&M’s. Coke Zero

Dinner: Leftover pulled pork.

Dessert: Leftover apple pie and strawberry ice cream