James Happy Hour

Last night Peter and I had a fun little date at James.  From 5-7 PM, they serve beers and mixed drinks for $4 and burgers for $7.50.  SOLD.

We got there at about 6:45 PM, and wiggled into the last two seats available at the bar.  This deal is clearly a brilliant move on their part.  I think the chances of having a full bar at a tiny restaurant on St Marks Avenue on a Tuesday night are slim to none without it.  

The bar is painted black, and the wall behind has a big mirror that hung a bit high so that you don't have that awkward experience of watching yourself sip gin and tonic and stuff french fries into your mouth.  

The burgers were amazing, and the french fries: AMAZING.  They are super skinny, good McDonald's size fries covered in all kinds of fresh herbs (admit it: fries from McDonald's are the absolute perfect size).  Peter and I identified dill, rosemary, parsley, oregano, and thyme mixed in.  Yum.  

After watching our cute bartender make fun drinks throughout dinner, Peter wanted to try one.  He had a fun drink called a Straw Dog that was made with jalapeno-infused tequila, muddled strawberry simple syrup, and fresh lime.  The first taste was sweet and fruity from the strawberry, and then there was this light spicy ending.  Peter loved it; I loved having a couple sips. 

Salad season

Finally, really, truly: it's salad season.  

I eat salad (lots and lots of it) all year round, but this is the best of all possible times for rabbit-eaters.  The salad below took inspiration from a favorite spot in the Berkshires, Elizabeth's.  They serve a family-style salad that has everything but the kitchen sink in it: kiwi, strawberries, blueberries, beets, cucumbers, tomatoes, nuts, cheese, salami, olives, onions, carrots...you name it, it's in it.  It may sound like a strange combination of things, but it totally works.  

This one has red leaf lettuce, arugula, beets, strawberries, blueberries, cucumbers, carrots, pecans, and a Dijon-blue cheese vinaigrette.  It's not so much the exact things in this dish that I wanted to share, but rather the new way of thinking about salad.  

I've always had a pretty standard salad combination of lettuce, carrot, and cucumbers.  And I ate it every day.  But making salad this way -- with everything that's fresh and yummy right now -- it was a very lame, but very large, revelation for me.  

Carrot bread

We went camping this weekend! I'm not much of an outdoorsy girl, but this was super easy and fun. We went to the beach, swan in the freezing ocean, grilled hot dogs, and made s'mores.

I brought a loaf of carrot bread for breakfast, and everyone seemed to like it so much, I thought I'd share the recipe here. It's super easy to make. The hardest part is grating the carrots up.



Carrot bread

You will need:

1 cup sugar
3/4 cups cooking oil
1 egg (slightly beaten)
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup nuts or raisins
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
2 large carrots, grated fine

Combine the sugar and cooking oil in a medium bowl with a mixer. Add the egg. In a smaller bowl, combine the flour and baking soda. Stir the nuts and/or raisins in. This will coat them and keep them from rising up to the top of the bread. Add the cinnamon and salt.

Pour the dry ingredients in with the sugar mixture. Add the vanilla and stir. Fold in the carrots.
Pour the batter into a lightly greased bread loaf pan. Bake at 325 degrees for 1 1/2 hour or until lightly brown and a toothpick comes out clean.

Fridge-clearing vegetable patties

Fridge-clearing recipes are some of my favorites. You take what you've got -- whatever that may be -- and it comes together to make something edible. No buying something special, no defrosting something frozen, no worrying about it being beautiful.

A few weeks back I made these vegetable patties using all sort of odds and ends in my fridge and freezer, and put them over some rice to make a meal. The list below is what I used (roughly), but the beauty of this is that I think it could work with just about anything. I'm thinking squash, zucchini, onions, shallots, chopped spinach, shitake mushrooms...the list goes on and on.

Vegetable patties

You will need:

1/2 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup frozen corn

3 large cloves of garlic, minced

1 potato, peeled

1 yam or sweet potato, peeled

A handful of button mushrooms

1 large carrot, peeled

1 egg

1 tablespoon flour

2 teaspoons curry powder

A pinch of cayenne

Bunch of chopped parsley or cilantro

Put the peas and corn in a large bowl, and set out. Using a box grater, coarsely grate the potato, yam, mushrooms, and carrot. Squeeze as much of the water out as possible from the grated vegatables. I just grabbed handfuls and squeezed them over the sink. Add vegetables to the bowl, and add minced garlic. Stir in the curry powder, cayenne, and parsley. Add the egg and flour, and mix with your hands, like you're making meatloaf. It will be loose. Add more flour and another egg if you'd like to to come together a bit better.

Heat a large heavy skillet over medium high and add in a splash of olive oil. Form the vegetable mixture into 1 1/2 inch circles and place in the pan. Flatten down with a spatula. Cook for 5-6 minutes on each side, until golden brown. I made a curry-lime sour cream to go on top, below.

Curry-Lime Sour Cream

You will need:

1/2 cup sour cream

1 teaspoons curry powder

Juice from 1/2 a lime

Salt and pepper

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl and blend with a fork until combined.

Road kill is certainly under the $10 mark

NPR is asking for readers to submit meals that will feed four that come in under $10. There are over 300 recipes submitted so far!

Many of the recipes contain rice and beans -- the cheap pantry staples -- but some are so creative and fun! Sweet potato kale quesadillas, brined pork with strawberry chutney, Moroccan chicken tagine, and on and on.

An entry from William Hovey Smith takes us way beyond rice and beans with a recipe for road kill deer stew. Luckily for us, William has a book coming out soon: Backyard Deer Hunting: Converting Deer to Dinner for Pennies Per Pound! I think I speak for everyone, William: Thank you for this amazing gift to literature.

Challenge details and recipes here.

(NPR, could I love you any more? I think not.)

To eat delicious things

Last weekend we went to Blue Hill at Stone Barn for a fantastic anniversary celebration. I keep meaning to write about it so I don't forget all the lovely things we ate, so here goes.

I told them a little bit about my allergies and what to avoid (there isn't a menu, so it's hard to know exactly what you'll be served) and they were super accomodating. I think Peter was a little nervous he'd be given a more limited menu because I was, so he was sure to tell the server that he was super adventurous and just wanted "to eat delicious things."

Cute sheep! I have a thing for barnyard animals. Even bald ones.

They brought over some parnsip soup to start off. It was so light and creamy -- much less bitter than parsnip soup I make at home. My first course was a salad with lots of little micro greens and the most amazing sorrel mushrooms mixed in. There was a creamy green herb dressing smeared at the bottom of the plate that had lots of fresh mint. Mental note to self: cook more with fresh mint.

Then we both got a white fish in a light green herb broth. It tasted super buttery and creamy, but it was fairly small, so not at all overwhelming. The next thing I got was an amazing beef dish. So tender and perfectly pink. Peter had lamb something that he liked a lot (see our lamby friends above).

Then we decided to get cheese. There were two types of cheddar and two types of blue cheeses, served with honey and that amazing pickled celery I mentioned last week. I can still imagine the taste of it perfectly.

For dessert, Peter got an amazing looking coffee brownie with ice cream, and I got a pineapple and sorbet combination. I usually hate fruit desserts. They seem fake to me (hello -- fruit is a breakfast food), but these pineapples were spiced with cinnamon and some other yummy things I couldn't identify. But it was very, very good. (Though I must say, how local are pineapples in April, Dan Barber?)

All in all, it was probably the best celebration spot we've ever been to. Fantastic from start to finish.

Pickled

Ate this amazing
pickled celery at Blue
Hill Stone Barn Sunday.


----------------------------



So I made my own at home this week! Except with carrots, asparagus, and radishes. Pickling has always sounded really hard to me, but quick pickling was so easy.

I've been throwing them in with salads, rice noodles, cole slaw and tacos all week. They would also be delicious paired with a cheese course, which was how we had them at Blue Hill. I'm looking for other things to pickle, and I think fennel might be next.

Aren't they pretty?

Pickled vegetables

You will need:

1 lbs of fresh veggies (carrots, radishes, asparagus, fennel, etc.) cut into tiny matchsticks or shredded with a grater
1 1/4 cups water
1 cup white vinegar
1 cup sugar
2 or 3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
1/4 cup fresh dill

Place vegetables in heat-proof bowls. Bring remaining ingredients to a boil in saucepan, then reduce heat and simmer 2 minutes. Pour pickling liquid over veggies and cool, uncovered. Add chopped dill to the bowls, cover, and refrigerate.

These get better as time goes on, but I ate mine as soon as two hours later, and they were already delicious. They keep, chilled in an airtight container, for 1 month.

One of life's great mysteries

New office dish soap.

Why can I only smell it

for a few days and

then the scent dies off?

Olfactory glands, we need

to talk about this.

Won't be so neat

Chocolate peanut
butter cake: hard to go wrong.
Mine won't be so neat.

Limited

Limited supplies:

single apple, stale cream, and

not much else to eat.

(*Photo isn't of my fridge exactly, but pretty darn close.)