A Hangry Hiatus

I can’t believe how long it has been since my last post!  I am sorry for all of my readers who have by now, given up on the Hangry Foodasaurus.  I’d like to think I have a pretty good excuse for not writing and my hope is that once I explain what’s been holding me back, you’ll forgive me.

As some of you know I’ve just completed my 200-hour Yoga teacher training, which took place over the course of 9 intensive weekends.  We traveled from Boston to Philadelphia about once per month and Nathan and I were hosted while we were staying there by some very gracious friends in the area :).  The weekends were extremely challenging physically and mentally, but one particular weekend I was more exhausted than ever.  I could hardly keep my eyes open.   The next morning I tried drinking some coffee and for those of you who know me coffee is a must!  After the first sip I could hardly keep it down.  Hmmmm…well after putting two and two together I surmised I might be pregnant, and it turns out I am!

Of the many interesting changes that come with being pregnant I found one of the craziest to be the absence of hangriness.  No shakiness, dizziness, extreme agitation.  In fact, for the first 3 months I could hardly eat anything at all and especially couldn’t fathom touching a vegetable.  Hummus became my enemy.  The thought of salad made me gag.  I was all about reverting to my childhood:  mac and cheese, pop-tarts, frozen waffles, pierogies.  Thank goodness I am over that hump because it was starting to get a bit unhealthy.

Don’t get me wrong, I still need snacks and treats, but at least I can say I eat vegetables again.  Way back in December I started to get a hankering for scones.  I found a really good recipe from Joy of Baking, which I’ve adapted slightly.  Since then I’ve made this recipe a total of three times, each time varying the ingredients ever-so-slightly with amazing results. 

You’ll need:

• 2 cups (260 grams) all purpose flour

• 1/4 cup (50 grams) granulated white sugar

• 1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder

• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda

• 1/4 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 cup (113 grams) (1 stick) unsalted butter, cold and cut into pieces

•  1 total cup of filling ingredients such as: chocolate chips or chunks, toasted walnuts or pecans, dried cherries or cranberries, fresh blueberries or candied ginger

• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract OR almond or lemon extract

• 1-2 teaspoons of lemon or orange zest

• 2/3 - 3/4 cup (160 - 180 ml) buttermilk (I never seem to have buttermilk so you can use regular milk and sour it by adding a tablespoon of lemon juice and allowing it to stand for 10-15 minutes)

• Turbinado sugar for sprinkling

Basically you want to pick things that sound like they’d work well together like:  Lemon-ginger, dark chocolate and dried cherries and walnuts, cranberry-orange, lemon-blueberry.

How to:

1) Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C) and place rack in middle of oven.

2) Grease a baking sheet with organic vegetable shortening or use parchment paper.

3) Zest orange or lemon if using zest.

4) In a small measuring cup whisk together the buttermilk (or milk and lemon juice) and extract.

5) In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

6) Cut the cold butter into small pieces and blend into the flour mixture with a pastry blender or two knives. I don’t own a pastry blender so I just ended up crumbling it with my fingers to get all the big chunks out.  (The mixture should look like coarse crumbs.)

7) Stir in the chocolate chunks, dried cherries, nuts, lemon or orange zest, etc.

8) Add wet mixture to the flour mixture. Very Important! Stir just until the dough comes together (add more buttermilk or flour as necessary). Do not over mix the dough.

9) Transfer to a lightly floured surface and knead dough gently four or five times and then pat the dough into a circle that is about 7 inches (18 cm) round and about 11/2 inches (3.75 cm) thick. At this point my dough is always on the flaky, dry side and not every bit of flour is mixed in but that is OK.

10) Cut this circle in half, then cut each half into 4 pie- shaped wedges (triangles). Place the scones on the baking sheet. Brush the tops of the scones with a little milk and sprinkle with turbinado sugar for a nice effect.

11) Bake for about 15 to 20 minutes or until golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Remove from oven and place on a wire rack to cool.

Makes 8 scones.

Dark Chocolate, Cherry, and Walnut Scone: A. Andiorio

These have been an absolute winner every time I’ve made them.  They are moist, flaky and go great with your morning coffee or tea.  They are best consumed right out of the oven, but if you somehow have any leftovers they are also good warmed up in a toaster oven.  

Birthday Times! Ice Cream and Cake and Cake!

The finished product!  Yellow Cake with Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting

Yummilicious with French vanilla ice cream

On January 3, we celebrated Nathan's 31st birthday!  Some neighbors and friends joined us and though it was bitter cold outside (8 degrees F!) we had a cozy little gathering.

If you want the recipe, it is from an awesome food blog Smitten Kitchen 

I pretty much followed the recipe exactly, except for the cake: I used wheat flour, and organic cane sugar, which created a cornbread-like effect and was very tasty.

Also for the icing what I did differently was omit espresso and used brown rice syrup instead of corn syrup.  It was sort of difficult to spread, but with some elbow-grease it all worked out nicely.

Now for the hilarious part!  So, I have never made a real, from-scratch cake.  I was hell-bent on doing a 9-inch layered cake and this recipe seemed fool-proof, or so I thought...

Cake batter prep went smoothly and looked beautiful.  I popped the pans in the oven and about halfway through baking I smelled something burning.  I ran over to the oven to discover my cakes flowing like lava out of the pans and oozing onto the oven and all over the racks!!!  I quickly slid some baking sheets under to catch the goo.  Sadly, that didn't work and the bits on the bottom caught fire and smoke was billowing out of the oven :(

Thankfully, Nathan saved the day by calmly opening the window, shutting off the oven and helping me pry burnt pieces from the oven.  He reassured me the cakes could be recovered, which I doubted but wanted to believe.

So I set about scraping the pans' edges free of batter, placing sheets under the pans and commencing with part 2 of the baking.  It worked!!!  I was thrilled!  Nathan was thrilled too because the cake kept oozing but eventually formed a nice little mold of cake around the outside of the pans which we were able to eat right away!

If I didn't tell you it happened, there was no way to tell there was a cake mishap!  The only thing I can think that went wrong is that perhaps the pans were 8-inch causing the overflow.  Or maybe my baking soda was too fresh?  I checked and the flour was definitely not self-rising.

Everyone liked it, we had a little adventure making it and I finally succeeded in making a cake from scratch.  Yay!

I'd love to hear about your baking mishaps--do share as it's way more funny after the fact ;)

Pizzelles: A Holiday Tradition

Pizzelles remind me of my childhood and kind of look like snowflakes

Pizzelle iron made in Pennsylvania close to my hometown in Southwest PA!

A tin my grandparents had given to me for the express purpose of pizzelle storage

 


















Pizzelle-making has been a tradition in my family for as long as I can remember.  My grandparents would spend countless hours preparing the batter, placing dollops of the batter onto the iron and blessing each pair with a prayer before moving onto the next.  Not only was the prayer a blessing, but it was also the perfect amount of time that the pizzelle had to stay on the iron for proper cooking time (about 30 seconds).  I remember the process being an all-day affair because we made at least 12 dozen cookies and you can only make 2 at a time!

Most Italians in our hometown made them around the holidays, but my grandparents had them available year-round.  My cousin and I would sneak into the walk-in pantry in my grandparents' cellar and pop open one of the enormous tins and have a few pizzelles every day!  They are truly addictive with their sweet crispiness and lingering subtle combination of anise, vanilla and lemon extract.

There are tons of variations in the recipes such that you can make them chocolate, vanilla, lemon with lemon zest and extract, anise with or without seeds...name your favorite flavor and it likely can be done!

In my family's recipe anise is the prominent flavor with vanilla and lemon not far behind.  By having all three extracts the anise wasn't super-overwhelming (the black licorice flavor can be a turn off for some palates).  Fact:  One of my youngest cousin's (who shall remain nameless) diet basically consisted of pizza, chocolate and pizzelles.  I am not kidding!  For a picky-eater, pizzelles remained high in his ranking!

I made a recipe of 3 dozen last week and they were gone in less than a week!  I did give some away AND we were out of town for a few days.  I swear I only ate 3 or 4...My husband only had 1!  I have no idea how they disappeared so quickly!

Since they were always readily available in my house growing up, I reached for them in times of hanger/hunger.  Pizzelles tend to bring out the Hangry Foodasaurus in the best of us so be on the lookout!

The basic recipe has flour, eggs, vegetable shortening or oil, sugar, and extracts of your choice.  No dairy, no nuts, so they are "safe" for most people with common food allergies (dairy, nuts).  Let me know if you'd like the recipe that I used last week.

Note:  The way my family passed on the recipe was by including it, hand-written in the pizzelle-iron box.

Pasta is an entirely different and extremely important tradition in my family as well, but more on that as the holiday season progresses...until then, send me your comments, feedback, thoughts!

The Fairy Tale of El Bandido

El Bandido restaurant, what a wonder you were to behold.  Located in Spring Valley, NY, this little place has everything a Hangry Foodasaurus could dream of.  We had had some recommendations from our hotel (thank you so much!), but we never expected our experience to be so, well, magical!


We arrived.  We were seated.  We observed:

Tasty Mexican cuisine...check!

Fun and colorful ambience...check!

Kind and attentive service...check!

Price...well, it seemed a little expensive but here's why it was worth it:

We all ordered margaritas and I ordered tamales and my counterparts ordered enchiladas and a burrito.  


They served us chips and salsa.  Everything seemed to be going business as usual until low and behold they brought a cheese quesadilla appetizer with guacamole to our table.  We thought to ourselves...this can't be for us we didn't order an appetizer...hmmm....we gobbled it up quickly before they could take it away!  But, we realized that everyone was getting this appetizer as a part of the meal.  Pretty fantastic!


Then the main courses arrived.  The tamales were in house-made fluffy corn shells unlike I have ever eaten before.  Everything was awesome!  We thought it was over but then they brought us dessert!  We didn't even order dessert, it just came along with the program.  I can't exactly remember the details but it was some sort of crispy, cinnamon shell with bananas and ice cream.  It was just the perfect amount of dessert that your taste buds desire after dinner.


Then the real clincher--AFTER DINNER DRINKS!  Unsolicited, tasty after-dinner dessert shots.  Unbelievable!


We honestly couldn't have predicted that any of this would unfold like it did.  They so far exceeded our expectations that it is almost sad to go to any other Mexican restaurant now because it won't be as impressive.  


In any case, it was a fun way to end a lovely weekend of celebrations and it's always good to to open to happy surprises.  

As a side note:  I promised on my other blog to list the basic recipe we used when making tomatillo salsa.  We discovered that cumin and tomatillos makes that distinct Mexican food flavor--try it!  This recipe is a simple one from allrecipes.com submitted by Kim Binning.  The only thing we changed was we sized everything down as we had less tomatillos + we added a spice blend with chile peppers + we added a small amount of an heirloom red sweet pepper instead of the serrano chile.

Ingredients

• 1 pound tomatillos, husked
• 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
• 1 teaspoon minced garlic
• 1 serrano chile peppers, minced
• 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, or to taste
• 2 cups water

Directions

1. Place tomatillos, onion, garlic, and chile pepper into a saucepan. Season with cilantro, oregano, cumin, and salt; pour in water. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer until the tomatillos are soft, 10 to 15 minutes.
2. Using a blender, carefully puree the tomatillos and water in batches until smooth.

Breakfast of Champions

In May, my husband and I spent about a week in Bordeaux.  When we travel we sort of like to pretend that we are locals, rather than tourists.  In fact, many people mistook us for being French which we took as a HUGE compliment.  We spoke the language (not well, but we tried) and we basically relaxed and tried to get into rhythm with the beat of the city.


We went out to eat at many wonderful places, but we also enjoyed a lot of picnics at different spots along the Garonne River and in the lovely city parks.  One really cool thing was that the sun didn't set until 10 pm!  I am not kidding--I took a photo one evening of the clock in the square during the sunset because I couldn't believe it.  It is literally a city that doesn't sleep because it's never dark!  


There was a culture for trick roller-bladers, skateboarding, cycling, sailing, strolling and enjoying life.  One really funny thing we noticed is that literally everyone is always noshing on baguette!  It would be unusual if you didn't see someone carrying a baguette (or two or three!) at all hours of the day and night.  We were staying right in the heart of the city so there were always tons of people around shopping, sitting in cafes, playing music, taking photos, and going to and from work and school.  Note: there are 70,000 undergraduates in the area, attendees of the University of Bordeaux.


One of my favorite mornings, I stopped in the city indoor marketplace.  The kind where business people pop in before work and get a quick espresso and older adults have a pastry and espresso inexpensively.  I sidled up to a very, very old woman who was enjoying a croissant and coffee.  The best part was that she was seated at the bar, but in a normal-sized chair and had her goodies resting atop a bar stool.  I gathered that this was her everyday ritual because the barista seemed to know her and helped her set everything up in a very dignified way.  I ordered my espresso and I was amazed that it cost less than one euro.  It definitely wasn't the tastiest, but it got the job done of waking me up. 


While I stood there, I was so thrilled because I could understand the conversation around the bar which was a discussion about the food-borne illness outbreak that the Germans had blamed on cucumbers and other produce from Spain.  I had heard about it in the news and for the rest of the trip was a little wary of my raw salads, but nothing was taken off the shelves so I figured what the heck, I'll eat whatever.  The source of these illnesses never turn out to be what they think it is anyway.  The main thing I cared about was that I could understand French!  


Satisfied and caffeinated, I proceeded to the grocery store (a Carrefour chain place) bought a baguette, a jar of Nutella and some apple juice and I went outside and sat on a bench and enjoyed my breakfast of champions!

A. Andiorio, petit dejeuner des champions!

Since our return from France we realized we were craving a lot more bread and chocolate.  We now have two kinds of chocolate spread for toast which for me has lately been turning into grilled banana and hazelnut spread sandwiches.  


You can try one in Cambridge at Crema Cafe in Harvard Square or they are totally simple to make at home.  Here's what you do if you want to have the most amazing snack ever!  


-Heat your panini grill or pan (like you would use for grilled cheese) on the stovetop,
-Slice one banana,
-Get two slices of delicious bread (classic, French bread or Italian white works best),
-Spread Nutella or your other favorite almond-chocolate or hazelnut-chocolate spread on each side of the bread,
-Add the sliced bananas and panini that bad-boy until the insides are melty and delicious,
-Slice diagonally and get ready to die and go to heaven.  End of conversation.  

Sesame-Garlic Greens with Carrots

All I can say is YUM!  I love when I am working from home and can create whatever inspires me for my lunch.  Don't get me wrong I was slightly sad that there was no leftover pizza for me, however, this encouraged me to think outside the bread and cheese box :)

We have a CSA through Red Fire Farm and this time of year the crop yield is higher so we had quite a lot to work with including:

Swiss Chard (one small bunch)

Carrots (two)

Fresh Garlic (one clove)

Sweet Onions (one stalk greens from a large, sweet onion)

also featured in my meal today:

Bulgur Wheat (1 cup, uncooked)

Organic Tempeh (1 cup chopped)

Reduced Sodium Soy Sauce (2 Tablespoons approx.)

Toasted Sesame Seeds (2 Tablespoons)

Sesame Oil (1/4-1/2 teaspoon)

Extra Virgin Olive Oil (1 Tablespoon)

For this simple, vegan dish all you do is cook bulgur according to the directions (1 cup grain per 3 cups water).  Chop tempeh and season with soy sauce and let sit while you chop the other veggies.

Rinse and de-stem swiss chard and chop.  Chop large clove fresh garlic, cut and peel and thinly slice the two carrots, and rinse and chop one stalk of green onions.  Toast sesame seeds in toaster oven--watch closely to prevent scorching!

In large pot or skillet, add olive oil over med-high heat.  Add chopped garlic, saute till lightly browned, add carrots, stirring constantly for about 2-3 minutes.  Add swiss chard and continue to saute and stir.  Add a tablespoon of water if needed.  Once everything is slightly softened toss in tempeh and continue to stir till heated through.  Lastly add green onions and stir-fry one more minute.  Remove from pot and toss in a bowl with toasted sesame seeds and sesame oil. Serve over cooked bulgur and add more soy sauce if desired.

See how good it looks for yourself!

ALA, 2011 [Looks gorgeous in a Frog Hill Pottery bowl]

ALA, 2011 [Sesame-Garlic Greens with Carrots]

Red, White, and Blue Slaw

Happy 4th of July everyone!  Hope yours was filled with some important f words including: fireworks, friends, family and FOOD.

I invented a little slaw for the day and I wanted to share this simple recipe:

1 small Napa or green cabbage--or a mix of the two (about 3-4 cups), shredded

ALA, Chioggia beets,  2011

2 small Chioggia beets, shredded 

1/4 cup high-quality blue cheese (I used Valdeon Spanish Blue), crumbled

1-2 garlic scapes (or green onions) chopped

Dressing:   (I am guessing on quantities here, so I recommend you mix and match to your desired taste in a little bowl and keep testing till it's just right)

Vinegar (white wine)-2-3 teaspoons

Extra Virgin Olive Oil-2-3  tablespoons

Maple syrup-1 tablespoon

Salt and pepper

Rinse produce.  Chop Napa or green cabbage into bite-sized shredded pieces or use a grater  or grate setting on food processor.  Chop scapes or green onions with knife.  Wash and peel beets and then carefully grate with a stand-up grater.  Crumble blue cheese with your fingers.  Whisk your dressing ingredients with a fork in a separate small bowl.  Combine everything in a large bowl except for the beets!  Toss well and serve at room temperature.  Right before serving, add beets to mixture, otherwise they will turn the slaw slightly pink.  

Voila!