cakealacky

First: I just ate almost half a pan of spoonbread. After I ate dinner. And I’ve also got banana cake in the oven. Why? Because. I’m turning 30 in three days.

Second: I love Mediterranean Deli so much, I wish they would move to Durham. Their pita is DELICIOUS, and it’s got that perfect stretchy, pliable texture. Doesn’t get all dried out in a day like the pita they sell at the grocery store. And they make it in-house, with local organic flour. Did I mention that I love this place? I bought two bags of pita to bring home even though I’m leaving town in three days. Oh, and I’m leaving town in three days. Yoni and I are going on our first vacation that doesn’t involve visiting either my family or his family in…two years, I think? I’m bringing my camera. There will be lots of pictures of food.

Third: My left eye has been twitching for three weeks. Is it a brain tumor, or just all the dog hair and pollen up in this house?

Fourth: I went to a kinesiologist today. I’m still not sure if he was a voodoo witch doctor. He did some sort of hip adjustment that was possibly the most painful thing I have felt in years. He was much friendlier than any real doctor I’ve ever been to.

Lastly, and most important: It is the end of May. That means in just two months, I’ll finally be able to make this cake again:

This is a phrase that has become my mantra lately. Life hands me lemons, I chant “make lemonade…just…make lemonade” under my breath like a crazy woman. Like during mother’s day brunch service, when I dropped an entire gallon jug of milk into an open bucket of chicken stock and it splashed up all over me. I just took a deep breath (after yelling “fuck me!” a few times) and decided it was time to make myself a nice fancy espresso drink and take a little break. These things happen, after all.

I decided on my new mantra after my first total meltdown at work; I was carrying a tray of mimosas (and no, I’m not a server) to a table that had seemingly disappeared. After running upstairs, downstairs, and outside, I finally managed to find them and set the tray down on a wobbly table. Every single glass slid off the tray and shattered right there, in front of an enormous group of people. I totally lost it, the kind of freakout where you are sobbing in the walk-in and even breathing the strawberry-scented air doesn’t make you feel any better. I can’t even explain why that was my breaking point. I guess everyone has one, and I’ve been working this job for several months without incident. But honestly, sometimes personal life plus work stress just makes something like that so much worse than it really is.

So, on that note, I recently went strawberry picking (nice segue, eh?) and got a whole lot of strawberries for jam-making. I’d already made jam once, a few weeks ago, with strawberries from a different farm, and I figured I’d just do it again and share the fruits (no pun intended) of my labor with some friends. But these strawberries? They were not having it. I didn’t really know what to do with my failed jam-soup, so I stuck it in the freezer for a few days, and thought about what to make with it.

And then, lemonade! Well, not literally.

Homemade pate de fruit out of failed jam is really not a bad thing. Oh, and in case you ever happen to fuck up some jam, here’s how to make delicious french candy out of it:

Take 4 cups of jam-soup, and whiz in the food processor. Pour into a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Sprinkle 4 teaspoons powdered pectin over it, whisk to blend, bring to a boil. Cook till 223 degrees, then pour into a parchment-lined pan and let set. Cut into squares and roll in vanilla sugar. Share with friends!

apparently I mean “in about a month or so.” After the millionth spam comment I realized I should probably post something so it’s worth deleting those every day. Why do I get so much spam anyway? Is it because I grew up in the Caribbean? The spammers know that me Granny used to mek me macaroni and spam, don’t they?

So, where was I?

Oh, right. Goats. Click on the little pics for bigger versions.

Since I actually had a Sunday off, and Yoni and I were both working on his birthday, we decided to go to one of Celebrity Dairy’s dinners as an early birthday celebration.

We got there a little late, but still in time for deviled eggs! From the farm’s chickens, of course. Also pictured: goat cheese with curry and chutney, peppercorn-crusted chevre, and the mold-ripened Silk Hope, coated with ash.

First course: spelt crepes filled with asparagus, goat cheese herb dressing. Eh, t’was okay, but probably made better sense with the salmon; vegetarians don’t do as well here as meat eaters, in terms of flavor/creativity. But I didn’t really mind, since a: they probably don’t serve many vegetarians and b: it’s not a restaurant and c: they are serving 40 people at a time.

Main dish: stuffed mushrooms, kasha pilaf, Sunny Slope tomatoes with chevre. These tomatoes were so good, I kind of wished the salad was the main dish. I’ve also realized that I don’t like kasha at all. Sorry ancestors. I tried cooking it a few months ago and the smell was enough to put me off forever. I tried, I really did; butternut squash pilaf sounds good, no? But I just…can’t. Bad jew. The meat-eaters had some kind of lamb dish.

Dessert, my favorite part of this meal: strawberry shortcake! Yoni apparently has a more refined palate than me, cause he could taste goat somethingorother in the biscuit and I couldn’t. In fact, I told him I didn’t believe him, so he asked the owner and sure enough, there was both goat’s milk and goat cheese in the biscuits. And I call myself a professional!

Hello friend. I should have asked the owners where they got their strawberries, since I don’t think it’s strawberry season around here yet. But maybe it is; I haven’t been getting to the farmer’s market much lately since I work on weekends.

Anyway, the food at Celebrity Dairy wasn’t really the reason we were there. We were there to hang out with baby goats! I got my sweater chewed, watched a baby goat fall asleep on itself, and reunited with number 22, my favorite goat from the first time we were there. And yes, I have pictures, but that’s a whole other post. (Coming soon, I promise!)

My brain’s a bit of a mess these days. I’m trying to keep up with this whole blogging thing, but I’ve just been feeling generally uninspired and stressed out lately for a variety of reasons (well, really just one reason, but I can’t talk about it on the internets YET. So there.)

To continue where I left off last time: this month I had two sets of cookies to make for the monthly cookie. In addition to the compost cookies, I also made these homemade Thin Mints! I was actually pretty excited about making these since I can’t even remember the last time I ate an actual Thin Mint. (I don’t particularly want to support the Girl Scouts, and I also try not to eat highly processed foods. Also: homemade junk food is the best.) If my memory serves me correctly, these came out a good bit thicker and less crunchy than the Girl Scout variety. But they were really, really good. And I realized that they could easily be made vegan, since all you’d have to replace is a small amount of milk and the butter (soy-free earth balance for the win!) I’m gonna try making them vegan sometime soon, I swear. After I digest the two dozen cupcakes I ate over the course of this weekend.

Drying cookies after dipping in chocolate glaze. Yes, my kitchen is a mess. Less than four months left on this lease and then I’m free of the tiny awful kitchen!

These took forever to harden; I ate a lot of them straight outta the fridge.

Close-up, after dipping.

Yoni’s mom was in town for a minute on the way to and from a bread-baking workshop in Asheville last week, and I took a trip to La Farm with her on my day off. There is really nothing bad you can say about this place unless you are a: vegan or b: gluten intolerant. Oh, wait, there’s that one other thing…the bakery is in Cary, a town I have absolutely no reason to go to and that’s half an hour from Durham. Maybe there are other things to do in Cary but from an outsider’s perspective, it just looks like miles and miles of ugly developments, strip malls, and big stores. Very suburban. We ordered lunch and I got a slice of berry-cheese tart:

The quiche/salad I got was good, but the salad dressing that came with it was super sweet and tasted like from-a-bottle. Next time I’ll ask for something else or just oil and vinegar. There were also some hotties working behind the counter, which is always a nice surprise. (Oh man, do people talk about us Guglhupf employees this way? I better watch it.)

I got all weirdo-touristy and wandered around taking photos after I ate:

I should try to figure out if there’s other stuff to do in Cary next time I want to make the trip to La Farm. Even though I work at a bakery I still really like going to other bakeries, but compared to my previous home (Philly) we gots nothing here in Durham. And places like Mad Hatter’s don’t count. Blech!

I made these a few weeks ago, and I’ll be making them again for a friend soon. Have you made them yet? Because you should, and the recipe is all over the interwebs. I never went to Milk Bar when I lived near NYC, and I’m still not sure how I feel about cereal-milk flavored soft serve, but these cookies are AMAZING. Seriously.

Real posts coming soon, I swear. Been working a lot while one of my coworkers is in San Francisco touring medical marijuana dispensaries. Sweet!

Well, I had been holding off on posting until I’d gotten some decent photos of the food I’ve been making. But honestly? I am not a very good photographer, and I haven’t had much time or inclination to get better lately. A review in the paper made for a very busy weekend at work, and after all that there were trips to Costco and Whole Foods and chores to do and by dinnertime we were eating quesadillas or pasta or something else not very noteworthy.

Despite my tiredness, I did make monkey bread one night last weekend. And we ate the entire pan between that night and the next morning. I got my period the next day, so that was a totally reasonable decision on my part. But that guy I married? Not sure what his excuse was. (Insert him mumbling something about programming or data analysis or tasks or graphs while stuffing monkey bread in his face.) We took photos, but they aren’t worth sharing. I will, however, share photographic evidence that I ate a poached egg on top of pasta:

I may have paired eggs and heavy cream in one meal, but that spring mix totally cleared my arteries. And then I drank some mint tea, so there.

Oh, and this weekend we’re going to Richmond for the North American Handmade Bicycle Show! I’ll do my best to actually take decent photos of the food I eat there. I’m pretty darn excited to go back to this place:

And I’m sure there will be new places too, and maybe even a picture with my face in it!

A while back, I tweeted about making a grapefruit yogurt cake, and got responses ranging from “sounds weird” to “that’s disgusting.” Since I’m easily influenced by others, I held off on making it until last night, when I realized that I still had both grapefruit and yogurt that needed to be used, SOON. Grapefruit is certainly the underdog of the citrus world, and I think that even when people do get around to eating it, they’re certainly not eating it in cake. Poor grapefruit, so misunderstood.

This cake is actually a variation on a cake I’ve made several times; after making this one, my husband and I decided that we like it best with Meyer lemon and a quarter semolina flour subbed in for all-purpose. But I think I’d be happy eating some version or other of this cake for dessert from now until eternity, especially when it gets warm and I’m making homemade ice cream again; this would be fantastic with Lyon Farms blackberry ice cream. Next I think I’ll try Cara Cara oranges, and maybe cook down some of the juice into a syrup to add to the cake batter (thanks to Shuna Fish Lydon for that tip, in the comments of the original recipe.)

I used King Arthur Flour’s white whole wheat flour for this cake; it’s not cheap, but this is how I justify my excessive baking as of late. There’s no noticeable taste or texture difference from white flour, and this way I can feel a teeny tiny bit healthier. I also noticed that the flour is much, much cheaper if you buy it on King Arthur’s website; I paid over $8.00 for it at Whole Foods, but it’s only $4.50 online.

I’m not really sure what it means to be the “good news yogurt”, but I’ve been using Erivan for baking for a while now. I’m not really a fan of the yogurt by itself, since it has a very odd texture. See?

Maybe because it’s not homogenized? It’s also the tangiest, sourest yogurt I’ve ever tasted, which may be why it works so well in a citrus cake. I didn’t have quite enough for the cake so I supplemented with my favorite yogurt for eating:

This yogurt is the best: plain, with cereal, over fruit, in a smoothie. One thing I’ve learned about yogurt and dairy products in general is that their quality seems to be directly correlated with how religious their producers are. If there’s a bible quote somewhere on the packaging or the website, you know it’s good. (Bread is a whole other story though.)

…and that’s as far as I got with the picture-taking. In case you couldn’t tell from these photos, the lighting in our kitchen is incredibly bad. And by the time we got around to eating the cake, we were thinking about eating cake, and not taking photos.

In conclusion: do not fear the grapefruit.

Well, there are several reasons for that. I’ve been sick for almost a week now, and although the constant nose-blowing, body aches, and fever are gone, I’ve still got a canker sore gone rogue that’s causing me the most immense pain. (Seriously, my mouth hurts so much I can’t even enjoy eating. And I can enjoy eating when I’ve got the flu.) So it’s been hard to concentrate on anything for longer than two minutes.

I also started a new job last week, and I’m still working at my other job one or two half-shifts a week. I might just have to give that one up though. That certainly wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Today the chef called me to ask why I hadn’t made the cheesecake more seasonal. Um, lemon in January is not seasonal? Okay, dude, whatever you say. (To be more specific, I made lemon curd swirled white chocolate cheesecake, with more lemon curd folded into the whipped cream on top. Delicious! And, yes, seasonal, if you can ever call lemons trucked in from 2000 miles away “seasonal”.)

Oh, and in other sad news, my favorite Indian place in town has apparently closed. Too bad, since they were the best place for kadai paneer and they had the friendliest servers at any restaurant I’ve ever been to. That spot must be doomed.