For all of you who are local, Slanky sent me this and it looks pretty awesome!
Not that I don’t have a project in mind for all of those corks I’ve been saving up over the years! REALLY. I’m going to make that corkboard for the kitchen! It’s on the list! Along with about eighty other projects…hmmm, I suppose I can spare a few corks for a good cause and discount!
The other day I was driving by the Ballard Food Bank and operating just outside it was one of the Dante’s Hot Dog vendors. I’m just hoping they were giving hot dogs away for free because what kind of person tries to make a buck off of people who need to use the food bank? I mean if I were really hungry already and trying to get some food and this overwhelming hot dog smell comes wafting over I might go delusional and spend my last couple bucks on a dog. And somehow I think that’s just not quite right.
Today ekbo, Mr. J and I went down to Theo Chocolates to check out the fancy s’mores and they were excellent. Slanky told us about how Theo was celebrating National S’mores Day (did anyone know that was a day?) with home made marshmallows, graham crackers and your choice of their chocolate bars. They did not disappoint. I think all were in agreement that they were the some of the tastiest s’mores we’d ever had. I only wish I’d gotten a picture of one but we ate them so quickly that there was no time for documentation. I personally had the Chai bar with mine and ekbo had the mint. I think the coconut curry would have also been quite tasty. The marshmallow was really awesome. It had that marshmallowy taste with none of the plastic overtones that commercially made marshmallows have. And the graham crackers were much more buttery and a tiny bit thicker than the normal kind. If you’re in the Seattle area they’ll be serving s’mores tomorrow and Saturday from 3-6pm. Go get yourself one!
as most of you know my little sister, georgia, and her family (husband + 2 little boys) recently came for a visit. we had a wonderful, if exhuasting time. february is not an ideal time for travel under the best of conditions (unless perhaps you are in the bahamas or some other place with a nice winter climate), but add five kids under five to the mix, and it becomes very difficult! so much time to bundle everyone up, then there is the whining about the cold, trying to keep hats and mittens on, trying to keep kids out of snowdrifts, etc. the weather since they left has been fabulous, naturally. haven’t even needed hats and mittens at the beach the past couple of days.
anyway, despite the miserable weather we did manage to show them a few of the sights around switzerland, one of them being the château de Gruyères. besides the castle and the cheese, Gruyère is famous for it’s very thick and rich double cream. which i made sure, of course, that my sister was able to sample. We bought a container of double cream and a package of meringues (berries would have been my first choice, but in february meringues are a good substitute) on the way home. you can actually buy all this stuff in morges, but i personally think it’s always more fun right from the source.
the meringues are so pretty, like waves of silky white desert sand frozen in….um…i think i’d better leave waxing poetic about food to the food bloggers. but seriously, they are very pretty, don’t you think? i don’t know why, but they taste different than the meringues i am used to in the states. ryon, my brother-in-law, thought they tasted like popcorn balls. i checked the ingredients and the only thing they contain is sugar and egg whites, so i’m not sure where the different taste could come from. perhaps they use more of a brown sugar instead of a white sugar? i am not sure.
according to various sources i found on the internet you are supposed to dip the meringues in the double cream. i didn’t immediately adore this combination, but it has grown on me (have to use up all that double cream somehow, right?). the cream does a great job of cutting the sweetness of the meringues, and the silkiness of the cream also pairs well with the crunchy meringues. note: keep it under three meringues per sitting. otherwise the roof of your mouth will feel like someone has been going at it with sandpaper. the double cream is supposedly The Best. period. having not tasted any other double cream, i can’t say that myself, but it is good! here is poor niamh holding a meringue dipped in the cream so i could take a photo. how mean am i–making the child allergic to eggs hold the special-treat-’o-poison. i did give her a piece of chocolate afterwards for her assistance.
We eat a lot of squash in the Dahlia/Slanky household (well ok, Mr. J eats a lot of squash and since we have it around so much I’ve been trying to think of more ways to use it for our meals as well) and I’ve noticed that I’m pretty one-note with my uses. I’m wondering if anyone has ways they like their squash. I mostly use pumpkins and butternut squash and I either make soups or I stuff them with some sort of mixture, usually made up of stuff I have around, and bake them. Last night we had acorn squash baked with a concoction of garbanzos, onions, rice, spinach and some spices. It was pretty good but nothing spectacular. Can you get spectacular from squash? Anyway. What say you?
one of the hardest things for me about traveling with three small children is not being able to go out to restaurants. on our recent trip to spain there were so many cool restaurants i wanted to go to, but couldn’t. i suppose that’s technically not true. we could have gone to restaurants. but the probability of misery at restaurants is high, especially when the hours are funky, the focus is on quality not speed, and the children are already on the cranky side from spending the entire day being culturally enriched at museums, cathedrals, and the like.
however, as most of you know from pat’s blog we still managed to try some spanish gastronomic delights. this somewhat, though not completely, made up for eating more oscar meyer hot dogs in five days than we had in the past two years. we bought a few (perhaps i use that term a tad loosely, haha) cheeses, some chocolates, world class ham and….drumroll…polvorons.
these cookies, which are a traditional spanish christmas cookie, were divine! the flavor was fairly mild, though rich, and the texture was quite crumbly. a bit like a shortbread cookie, only much more tender. the cookies practically melt in your mouth without really having to chew. so dangerous! they are made primarily with lard, sugar, eggs, and some sort of ground up nut. i’m not sure if it’s almonds or hazlenuts. the word on the ingredient list was ametlla torrada, which i can’t find a translation for. but from doing an internet search on polvorons i’m guessing it must be one of the nuts i mentioned.
i need to experiment a bit and try to make my own. i think this russian tea cake recipe will be a good starting point, though sadly it will probably be a while before i get the energy to try it. perhaps next christmas.
Does anyone else follow the Orangette blog? if so, i apologize for the repetition. anyway, i love it. i love it so much that when we move back to seattle i might be in danger of becoming a molly stalker. and it will be so much easier now that she and her husband are opening up a restaurant in ballard! think me and my three rugrats can stealthily hang about the restuaruant every day, all sydney bristow-like, without anyone noticing? no? must come up with another plan.
at any rate, how cool is that? you all must go when it opens, take pictures, and tell me how it is so that i can live vicariously through you!
Before going to PA for Thanksgiving Eve, Sara, Amy (oh and Sara’s friend Karin) went to see “Twilight” the movie. It was what it was – definitely much better than my expectations. I just watched it again this weekend with my mom and I liked it even better the second time around. I think it helped to have moved beyond not accepting that the casting didn’t live up to my mind’s eye of the book characters. I really liked the style of the filming and the color palette. They definitely weren’t going for a Disney-like full color quality. Of course they adjusted the plot points a bit but overall they stayed surprisingly close to the book. Robert Pattinson, as Edward, was in fact pretty yummy but we caught a couple minutes of of him as Cedric in “The Goblet of Fire” on tv last night and he looks much better w/out white face paint and lipstick. Too bad he dies in that one.
The baseball scene turned out really cool and the end credits really rocked. Those were my favorite parts. Sadly none of it was actually filmed in Forks or PA. Which was a bummer. Forks the movie town was a cute little borough, definitely wet, but still cute which isn’t the real Forks, and the high school was this classic multi-story number you’d see, well I don’t know where you’d see it but not in Forks. My mom even started laughing at that first shot of the school (and so did Amy and I the first time around). The brief scene in PA wasn’t at all like PA either.
Our PA (the REAL place) Thanksgiving was great as usual. 17 people counting Mr. Jonah-cakes who enjoyed his cauliflower and cheerios.
Bella Italia: The sign lets you know about Bella & Edward
On Saturday Slanky and I ditched the kid and went out to dinner and a movie. We decided to try Bella Italia because we’ve never been there. You “Twilight” fans will note its reference in the book. We told ourselves we definitely weren’t going there because of the book but I think we were a little curious as to how much they’d play it up. The Peninsula in general has benefited a lot from the Meyer-mania. You can read about that here. My mom told us that there were some block-wide celebrations happening at all the businesses down town next to the theater showing “Twilight” when it first opened and we saw this display at a clothing store a couple storefronts down from Bella Italia.
Vampire-like clothes? Not sure. The apples in the display are a nice touch.
Apple in display
so, my mom is coming for a month long visit, arriving on thursday. i am quite excited, but one of our headaches with parental visits (both sets) is coffee grounds. how is it that they seem to make a giant mess more often than not? is this a general coffee drinker problem, or just a parental problem? anyway, to get to the point, pat and i are contemplating getting a nespresso machine so we can hopefully bypass coffee grounds altogether. they have a few regular coffee flavors in addition to the espresso flavors. and as an added bonus we could theoretically invite people over for coffee and actually have coffee to serve. imagine that! as most of you are aware, neither of us knows the first thing about coffee. so are hoping we could get some nespresso opinions, input and advice. please feel free to comment (as you always should) even if you did not attend PLU or don’t have a spouse/partner that attended PLU.
We just got back on Tuesday from a trip to PA. Having a baby has definitely changed our style of vacationing! The Peninsula seems so much further than it ever used to feel. Ok, perhaps that’s because we need to pack like we’re wintering in Juno but anyway… I digress.
We had a lovely time seeing the Wendels out at the lake even though the weather wasn’t as sunny as we’d hoped it would be. Slanky went skiing but I only touched the water to confirm there was no way I was getting in.
We also did a little hanging out with the family. My mom and grandma’s house sits on a couple acres of wooded land and so I returned to a favorite childhood hobby of mine-foraging. Naturally, in the city it’s a little hard to find great berry patches but out there was a gold mine. My mom and I took a little trip around the property and we found black caps (zillions of bushes, most weren’t ripe yet), huckleberries (which she kept referring to as currants), black berries and salmon berries (elusive, usually those are better found deeper in wooded areas or at least around taller trees than where we were). I also saw one thimble berry bush but none of the berries were ripe yet. Here’s our bounty after just a little while.
My mom was very impressive. She’d tromp through a bunch of sticker bushes just to get at a few ripe berries. On our way back Slanky and Mr J met up with us and got to pick a few berries too.
It was only berry picking but something about it, something I can’t quite put into words, made me really happy and perhaps a little sad in some small way. I felt pretty nostalgic as we were winding around in the wooded areas… an activity that I took for granted in my early childhood and it isn’t something that my children will really get to experience the way I did. Ok, enough with the heavy stuff.
We got the berries back to the house and experimented with making a pie out of them. It mostly tasted like blackberry but it was still a fun experiment. I think I’d like to try just salmon berries or just black caps. We had leftover dough so we decided to make a turnover with some strawberries that were grown by my grandma’s friend. My mom and Grandma were skeptical but allowed me to experiment so I made a balsamic strawberry one. I used about a tablespoon of vinegar and you could just taste a hint. I’d use more next time to bring out the flavor.
Anyway. It was a satisfying result to tromping in the woods with my mom. I’m thinking about persuading her to bring more black caps with her next time she comes but I know her adventures wouldn’t be as fun solo. But damn, those berries were good!