lots and lots of dim sum from golden bridge in the manhattan chinatown
mini key lime pie from steve's key lime pie at the atlantic antic
cheese and crackers
black tea
macaroni and cheese
lemonade
raspberry sorbet

trader joe's burrito
coffee
quiche lorraine and salad from le gamin
ginger creme brulee ice cream from the old brooklyn parlor
miso soup
apple cake
macaroni with meatballs and sauce

black tea
cheese and crackers
apple cake
granola bar
chicken taquitos
burger and fries from shake shack (rain=no line, apparently)
couple of hors d'oeuvres at alumni reunion
nori, pocky and orange milanos

iced tea
cheese and crackers
cereal and milk
apple cake
chicken fried rice
trader joe's burrito

Fluffy! (Pancakes, not a dog or anything)

I made lemon-ricotta pancakes a few days ago, as you can see from the lists below, but I didn't take any pictures until yesterday, since when I did make them, my roommate and I sat at the kitchen table and basically ate them as soon as they came off the stove. They didn't need any accompaniment (although I did put some syrup on a few, as the chicken and waffles from the day before reminded me that I might like syrup after many years of finding it unappealing) and had the right amount of citrus. They were, though, somewhat bland. We decided they either needed some sort of berry jam...or bacon. Maybe both. I settled on yogurt and honey, obviously.


I used this recipe, but with more flour instead of hazelnuts, and I certainly didn't strain the ricotta first or make the lemon sugar the day before. I also added the juice of a lemon, and if I make them again, I'd use oil instead of butter because I think it sort of solidified when added to the cold ingredients, although there might have been some curdling due the the lemon too.

Chickpeas in the form of falafel probably make up the best food. Ever. Assuming, of course, you fry them and don't bake them. (Seriously, why would you decide to do this?) I also have a fondness for chana masala, probably borne from frozen meals, which is kind of sad, although it's really very good for what it is. (Frozen Indian food.)
Which is to say, something named Popcorn Chickpeas is going to haunt me until I make it. With that recipe and another similar one, I made half a can up. It is...sort of terrifying to make. Granted, only three chickpeas total decided to exuberantly leave the skillet, but you could tell a lot more wanted to. I suppose I should have been clued in by the 'popcorn' part. After that though, I threw in some chopped garlic, cumin and salt and pepper and couldn't really stop eating it until I was done, even after I started to get kind of sick of them. It would make a good party snack, not that I've ever thrown a party in my life. But maybe it's time to start. (hint hint, roommates.)

mooncake
pasta with chicken
lemon-ricotta pancake with yogurt and honey
pickles
raspberry sorbet
(this list makes it sound like i'm pregnant. i'm not, just hot.)
leftover cranberry muffin
iced coffee
chocolate chip cookie
goldfish crackers

black tea
yogurt with honey
coffee
cranberry muffin
salad (chicken, blue cheese, crouton, onion)
iced tea
pasta with chicken
mooncake
vitaminwater

black tea
lemon-ricotta pancakes (foreshadowing!)
lunch at fatty crab with a friend from chicago and her boyfriend who requested this shout out. but he would have been mentioned anyways. i think. we had: steamed pork buns, malay fish fry, fatty duck and fatty tea sandwiches, listed in order of decreasing enjoyment. it was all very good though, just not as good as i hoped it would be.
gelato at otto (it rhymes! although probably not with proper italian pronunciation. and, apparently, owned by mario batali, for whatever that's worth.) with said companions-caramel gelato, ricotta gelato and lemon sorbet (which, the bartender said, was an interesting combination, but i may have just been thinking of the pancakes this morning.)
honey-wheat pretzels
chickpea salad
raspberry sorbet

animal crackers, goldfish crackers (the two aren't really combined, but I manage to eat out of both bags at least once a day)
lemon-ricotta pancakes
bulgogi and rice
lemonade
popcorn chickpeas!
cheese toast

black tea
animal crackers, goldfish crackers, peanut butter chips
coffee, eggs benedict (not really very good) with home fries and a salad from cafe shane
bites of roommate's order of (really pretty good) chicken and waffles
bulgogi-like marinated meat and rice
mango popsicle

black tea
orange juice
beef chili and rice
bulgogi (sort of) and rice
animal crackers, goldfish crackers
chicken (diablo) sandwich, which was just okay, at habana outpost
fries at black sheep pub

yogurt and honey
chicken taquitoes and salsa
orange juice
cheese and crackers
lomi lomi and rice
cranberry juice
pocky
chili and rice
mango popsicle

biscoff cookies leftover from a flight
black tea
leftover indian food
puffed corn cereal
orange juice
hagelslag
cheese and crackers
iced orange mocha
lemon pound cake

black tea
hummus and toast
tropicana berry smoothie thing
bagel and cream cheese
lomi lomi with rice
orange juice
saganaki!
bites of roommate's salad
chicken gyro pita

black tea
toast and hummus
nectarine
garlic bread
trader joe's peanut butter granola bar
lomi lomi and rice
orange mango peach juice
indian food- mulligatawny soup, potato samosa, paratha, with a little chicken curry.
peanut butter chips, chocolate sprinkles

sigh.

In reading another blog, Roots and Grubs, which is seriously prolific and I'm not quite at the end of the archives, I realized it's not called Baker's Illustrated at all, but rather, Baking Illustrated. I will assume this just makes it harder to Google and keeps me a few more steps away from being arrested for copyright infringement.

C is for Chocolate Cookie

These peanut butter chip chocolate cookies I've been eating constantly are pretty amazing. I made them for my friend's birthday (Happy Birthday!) and took them to her when we met in South Carolina. She agreed about the amazing-ness. I've made them before with white chocolate chips instead of peanut butter, and while I don't really like white chocolate (there was some deep symbolism involved in the recipe having them though) they were promptly eaten by my roommates and I instead of being given to our new neighbors, as was the original intention. Things have been sort of tense with them ever since.
Anyway, given that half a recipe made 20 cookies and had a whole half-pound of chocolate, there's pretty much no way they couldn't be delicious. The recipe comes from Baker's Illustrated, which I love more than my firstborn. If, you know, I had one. Ahem. I'll adapt it here, not out of any sort of altruism to you (and obviously not to the publishers) but so I can make it anywhere I have access to the internet. So:

Chocolate, chocolate, and more (yet optional) chocolate cookies.
(Adapted from Thick and Chewy Triple-Chocolate Cookies from Baker's Illustrated)
(Also, this is for the half-recipe, but you can double it. Or triple it. Or quadruple it. But I might stop there.)
Sift 1 cup of flour, 1/4 cup of cocoa, 1 teaspoon baking soda and 1/4 teaspoon salt together.
Melt 8 ounces of semisweet chocolate somehow.
Lightly beat 2 eggs and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract together, and 1 teaspoon of instant espresso powder on top.
Beat 5 tablespoons softened butter, add 1/4 cup white sugar and 3/4 cup packed brown sugar. Add egg mixture, then chocolate, then dry ingredients. Stir in 6 ounces of chips of some sort if desired.
Cover with plastic wrap in bowl, let sit at room temp for 1/2 hour.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line baking sheets with parchment paper. Place spoonfuls on sheets. Bake for 10 minutes, switching racks at the 5 minute point. (I should add here that I left the darker baking sheet in for 9 minutes, and the lighter one in for 11 minutes. They will still look soft and maybe just a little uncooked in the very center though.) Cool on pans for 10 minutes, then remove cookies to a wire rack to finish cooling. Eat.

two chocolate cookies
black tea
pasta with pesto
fajita chicken soup (campbell's?)
nori
chips and hummus. this blog makes it a lot harder to steal food from my roommates. but, um, thanks for the chips. (it was, like, FIVE, okay?)
i also went running. this was stupid. and painful. (but, 2.16 miles! most of which was spent in pain and only walking.)
orange vitaminwater to recover from running.
grilled cheese sandwich and a red bell pepper
peanut butter chips

okay, i'm back. i ate terrrrribly for 4 days straight. it was sort of awesome.

numerous homemade peanut-butter-chip chocolate cookies
potato chips on the beaches
a fried fish sandwich
onion rings
blueberry scone
gyro
buffalo wing flavored chicken tenders
IHOP!
nachos
coldstone creamery ice cream and sorbet
biscuits and gravy
assorted drinks, alcoholic and non

My sister just went off to college, so I felt obliged to send her a care package of zucchini carrot bread.


I also made one zucchini and carrot muffin so I could test it and make sure the bread was edible. I devoured this before photographic evidence could be taken.
I should mention here that I have a special fondness for zucchini carrot bread, as I had it while staying at the Sheraton in New Orleans when I was seven. I recall it was in their standard bread basket in just about every meal. It was delicious, especially as there was no way then I was going to eat frog's legs. It was at some computer trade show, I remember them unveiling some sort of new Macintosh.
I have a terrible propensity for baking bread for too short of a time such that it's either uncooked in the middle or comes out of the pan in more than one piece. This is clearly unacceptable for a gift. I think I baked it around an hour? It came out fine, with only a little knife work, and packaged up nicely.


It turns out, while my sister likes pumpkin bread and banana bread, she's not so much a fan of carrot bread. Sigh.

i am leaving you for warmer climes for a few days

orange mango peach juice
baklava
iced tea
cheese danish
chicken teriyaki with salad, california rolls
fanta
garliccheesebreadstick, what?
cookie

black tea
baklava
spanakopita
orange mango peach juice
chocolate chip cookie
coffee
animal crackers
ginger ale
sirloin burger (?) soup

black tea
baklava
last slice of berry pie
spanakopita
crackers and hummus
nori
tortilla chips
sliced potato and shallot with cheese
zucchini and carrot muffin

As astute readers will have noticed, the previous post indicates I still have half a roll of phyllo dough leftover for the Great Spanakopita Experiment. As is my wont, I turned to Baker's Illustrated again. Seriously, this is the best investment I've made. (By which I mean, the best Christmas present my sister got me that I didn't even ask for or know about.) Only after I bought ingredients for half a recipe did I realize that I completely missed the step where they mention they only use half of the phyllo dough anyways. I amended this by using two sheets nearly every time they wanted two. Also, they wanted all sorts of finicky things like fresh dill and fresh parsley, and I am neither made of money nor like parsley, so I omitted them, and made up for it with...a couple of dashes of dried dill. I'm pretty terrible. Finally, they wanted scallions. I was at the farmer's market when I realized that I have no idea what I scallion is. That is, I knew they were either green onions or shallots. Another recipe I was looking at for the GSE had green onions, but I couldn't recall ever having green onions in spanakopita. So I bought shallots, since I've never had shallots before, and I figured they were all onion-like things anyways, so it wouldn't make any difference. When I was walking home, I decided that scallions were almost certainly the same thing as green onions. (This is fascinating, I know. I could go on about all my thought processes concerning alliums. And I will!) Wikipedia indeed confirms that scallions are green onions. HOWEVER. A few sentences down, the good people of wikipedia mention that:

"Scallion" is sometimes used for Allium ascalonicum, better known as the shallot. The words scallion and shallot are related and can be traced back to the Greek askolonion as described by the Greek writer Theophrastus

Hence, I am vindicated. Assuming there's not some insane scallion-obsessed person trying to prove it is the same thing as a shallot. I used one shallot (whereas the recipe requested 3 scallions, and see, now even I'm getting confused typing all these out) since it was much stronger than I expected.
All these troubles aside, the GSE was a huge success and was incredibly delicious. I also got to use my new microplane grater for the first time, courtesy of Cook's Illustrated, as I decided I wanted some sort of magazine subscription, and it happened to come with something I was planning on buying eventually anyway.

Our freezer is similar to Mary Poppin's bag; it holds all sort of things, more than would seem to logically be able to fit in it. I had a roll of phyllo dough leftover from CONNECTICUT (I have a distinct memory of throwing it in my car straight from the freezer in my old apartment and driving straight to this apartment, about a 2 hour drive on the best of days). My other roommate had a package of frozen spinach, so it was logical to make spanakopita. I was vaguely worried about this, as I've had spanakopita I've liked and disliked before, and I'm not a huge fan of either spinach or feta. So I decided to half the recipe, and cut the phyllo into two, making a small thing of baklava. Because I was pretty sure I wouldn't screw baklava up. Now, I was having a really awful day, and was devastated when I realized I rushed and cut the phyllo dough into half the wrong way. But I calmed down, and cut it in half again to lay the pieces side by side. Which worked out just fine, as butter and sugar and dough and walnuts tends to do. Had I been thinking properly, I probably would have chopped up the walnuts finer (they were in 'baking bits' from Trader Joe's) but it still worked out fine. I halved this recipe and made it in an 9x9 baking pan, with room leftover on the sides. Also, the butter is just used for brushing the dough, and 4 tablespoons in a halved recipe was more than enough to douse everything.

black tea
baklava
bread with butter
crackers with hummus
orange mango peach juice
phyllo triangle filled with jam
spanakopita
nori
peas with mint

So, I'm not too busy to bake, but I am too busy to write about it.
Continuing the freezer purge, there were two pie crusts left, and my roommate requested I make apple pie from them. I can never remember what recipe I used the last time I made apple pie, and I knew I needed to make a smaller recipe than 6 cups of apple, so I looked at Baker's Illustrated, as usual, and a recipe from Baking Bites. I actually wrote the recipe down as I was making it, just in case it turned out to be the best apple pie ever. It wasn't, but it wasn't bad. The apples cooked down a lot, and also sort of lumpy, so I think I could have arranged them more compactly in the pie and fit more in, but my roommate had no complaints.
Apple pie is so much easier when you don't have to make the crust pie


Thaw frozen crusts for about 15 minutes. While thawing, slice 1 granny smith apple and 1 and a half golden deliciouses. Mix with 1/4 cup white sugar, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, a scant tablespoon flour, 2 dashes of salt, 2 dashes of nutmeg and a 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon. Let sit for 15 minutes or so. Place in pie crust and dot with a tablesppon of butter. Press down the other pie crust gently and place on top, using fork tines to seal the edges. Cut slits in a super cute and decorative way, and place in 425 degree oven for about 15 minutes, then 45 minutes to an hour at 375 degrees, until filling is bubbling. My crust got pretty brown quickly and had to be covered with foil, so watch it.

Then, realize you actually have an extra apple, some strawberries, and leftover crisp topping from a previous berry pie. Throw them together in a pie tin and also bake for about 45 minutes in a 375 degree oven.
Decide there wasn't enough butter or juice so it's not very browned or all that good. Offer to roommates anyway, and realize that three pies divides up into three people very easily. Really, I had one small slice each of apple pie and the apple-strawberry thing, and almost all of the berry pie, and each of my roommates staked out their own pies.

iced tea
toast with butter
berry pie
orange juice
leftover chicken and broccoli with rice, fortune cookie
chocolate
joong
orange mango peach juice
baklava! and a few bites of apple pie

black tea
two bites of leftover potato piroshki then decided it was gross
puffed corn cereal and milk
broiled cheese on toast
hot tea, hot and sour soup, chicken and brocolli at westside chef
animal crackers
a pim's raspberry cookie
nachos and a killian's at the coliseum.

iced tea
toast with butter
apple and strawberry crisp
latte
banana
subway ham and turkey sandwich, lay's jalapeno chips
orange fanta
black tea
chocolate cookie
animal crackers
ham and crackers
hagelslag


Also, I've been scooped! Not sure if it's good that I didn't name my blog "This is What I Eat" or if I could've gotten more traffic now if I had.

And, the place were I get joong (sorry, I mean, chinese tamales, or sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves) is closing. This is terrrrible. I was just there this weekend.

black tea
apple pie
iced tea
red berry special K with milk
banana
joong
ginger ale
healthy choice tv dinner with succotash and turkey and potatoes and gravy
berry pie

black tea
leftover mashed potato with onion
berry pie
iced tea
bits of apple while making apple pie
some sort of marvelous fried piroshki with meat from brighton beach.
a bread-y sort of cheese (farmer's cheese, tvorog) danish from same place.
only half the potato piroshki, somewhat reconstituted in the toaster oven.

scrambled egg (leftover from brushing the berry pie crust) and toast
aforementioned berry pie
pineapple
coffee
granola bar
joong
iced tea
microwave popcorn
a small slice of pie, (non) mitigated by whipped cream
crackers

The apartment has been trying to clean out the freezer, as I have previously mentioned. But here's why:


While it's exciting to pretend our freezer is turning into Hoth, it is not very practical. Neither practical is the three frozen pie crusts my roommate has had in there for months. But someday! He will make us quiche. But probably not in the next week. I had a bag of frozen berries that I hadn't used yet, so with my college-learned skills, I came upon the novel idea of making berry pie. I'm a genius, I know. I didn't think I would have enough berries though to fill up a pie, so I also bought some fresh strawberries. I glanced at my 'vintage' (1985!) Sunset Pies and Pastries book. They called for 6 cups of fruit, while the frozen pie crusts want 3.5 to 4 cups of filling. This detail was somehow lost on me, as I used about 5.5 cups of fruit. This ended up filling the crust to the brim. Hmm. This is also a problem when you put the pie into the oven or take it out, as the flimsy disposable pie tin is...flimsy. And bendy. Anyway. The below is somewhat adapted from the Sunset book, although it's really pretty basic.

End-of-the-summer, dying-freezer berry pie


Thaw frozen berries for a few hours, and drain off any excess water or juice. Add enough sliced strawberries to make 5.5 cups of fruit. Add 1 cup white sugar, 3 tablespoons cornstarch, and a half tablespoon lemon juice. Stir gently and let sit for about 15 minutes. Take out frozen pie crust and also let thaw for 15 minutes. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
While everything is sitting, make the streusel for the top. Sunset says 1 cup flour, 1/2 brown sugar, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, then rub in 6 tablespoons of butter. I had to sub white sugar, as I really truly believed in my heart that I had brown sugar. I also added 1/4 cup of oatmeal for a healthy sort of appearance. Dice the butter first, and then mash it in with a fork, then your fingers. This ended up being too much for my already overloaded pie and I had maybe a scant cup leftover.
Brush pie crust with a beaten egg. (I poked it a few times with a fork, but I don't think I really needed to do this.) Add as much fruit filling as possible. Panic. Top with streusel, panic some more. Wrap edges of pie crust with tin foil. Place in oven for one hour. (If you are me, don't make the streusel until after you put the pie in the oven, because you're looking at a different recipe. Make the streusel, and add it on 10 minutes later. Take the pie out of the oven, spilling filling in the process. Wipe up with kitchen towel. Add topping, place back into oven. Spill more filling. Wipe up with kitchen towel, which is now scarred for life. Thank your lucky stars that you had enough forethought to place a baking sheet on the rack underneath the pie when it spills some more, because this sort of thing has happened before. Not recommened, except that last tip about the baking sheet.) Take out of oven-carefully- after about an hour, when streusel is golden brown and filling is bubbling or near bubbling. Let cool while you're passed out from the combination of late August heat and standing in front of the oven while you were trying in vain to get the pie out safely.Confidential to travelling roommate: Come back soon. Other roommate apparently doesn't like berry pie at all, and I'm pretty sure I could eat the whole thing myself if I really tried.

black tea
berry pie
DUB steak and mushroom pie
pineapple
salmon and ham with crackers
italian sausage with peppers at giants stadium
an onion ring