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The Best Crepe I’ve Ever Had (and a trip to Iceland)

11 Mar

This post is going to serve as a shameless promotion of gorgeous pictures we took while in Iceland recently, while also highlighting the most delicious dessert I’ve ever eaten.

While in Iceland we did so many amazing things – we walked on a glacier!

Glacier3

We saw Geysir!

Geysir

We hung out at the most enormous waterfall – Gullfoss, “Golden Waterfall”
 Gullfoss Golden Waterfall

We walked between the American and Euroasian plates!

Thingvellir

It was just so amazingly wonderful and I cannot wait to go back.

We also spend some time walking around Reykjavik and eating some incredibly delicious food. One night after dinner while walking along the cobblestoned streets of Reykjavik,  we saw a small ice cream shop. While pondering our ice cream options, I saw their special – a dessert crepe.

Crepes are very popular in Iceland. Traditionally, they are made in a special crepe pan and then often filled with jam and whipped cream and folded in quarters or sprinkled with sugar and rolled into tight cylinders. They are often served with coffee or tea.

Our dessert crepe was a little different – it was filled with vanilla ice cream, nutella and strawberries, then rolled tight. The ends were then dipped in caramel chocolate sauce and rolled in salted nuts.

Crepe

 

I think it was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.

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Christmas Sweetheart Cookies

26 Dec Sweetheart Cookies

Hope everyone had a great Christmas and is gearing up for a fabulous new year!

I found the recipe for these super easy and delicious cookies in Taste of Home: Cookies. Reggie even tried to help make them.

Reggie helping make cookies

Check out my awesome purple polka dot PJs

Recipe:

3/4 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup sugar

1 egg yolk

1 and 1/2 cups flour

2 tablespoons raspberry or strawberry jam

Using a mixer, beat together the softened butter and sugar until it is creamy. Add in the egg yolk and mix it well with the butter/sugar mixture. Begin to add in the flour a 1/2 cup at a time, trying to get the flour mixed well with the rest of the ingredients. Once you’ve mixed it as well as you can (it’ll still be a sandy consistency), move it to a lightly floured surface and knead it by hand. Soon, the sandy blob will begin to look more like dough. Continue to knead for a few minutes or until the ingredients are thoroughly combined.

Roll the dough into 1-inch balls and place about two inches apart on a greased baking sheet. Using the end of a wooden spoon or the back of your 1/4 teaspoon, make an indention in the center of each ball. We used the wooden spoon this time, but I think next time we’ll try the back of the teaspoon. Fill each hole with 1/4 teaspoon jam.

Bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes or until the edges are lightly browned. Move the cookies to wire racks for cooling.

Sweetheart Cookies

Sweetheart Cookies2

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Homemade Granola Bars

14 May

I found this recipe on Girls Gone Child, which is an amazing blog. It is, in reality, a mommy blog, but it’s super well written with gorgeous photos and she just seems like such a cool person. So that is how I justify the fact that my favorite blog is a mommy blog. Anyway… her mom often writes “Eat Well” posts that feature delicious and nutritious foods, often vegetarian, which is another reason why I love the blog. So anyway, below is the recipe for homemade granola bars, care of Girls Gone Child, and tweaked a little by me.

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups rolled oats
  • 1 cup whole wheat flour
  • ½ c brown sugar
  • ¾ c raisins, dried cranberries or blueberries – whatever you’d like
  • ¼ c ground flaxseed
  • ½ tsp salt
  • ½ tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1 cup chopped mixed nuts
  • ½ c oil (or ¼ c oil + ¼ c applesauce)
  • ½ c agave nectar or honey
  • 1 egg
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • ¼ cup dark chocolate chips (optional)

Directions: 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and start thinking about how you’re going to ground the flaxseed. At least, that is how this recipe started for me. I had bought whole flaxseeds at Trader Joe’s and the internet told me that I could use a coffee grinder to grind them, but I was leery. After figuring out how to use the coffee grinder, it was smooth sailing. Super easy to grind and the ground seeds smell so nutty and delicious.

I actually took a bit of the ground flaxseed in a little container to work and have been putting it on my oatmeal in the morning.

After the grinding is complete, you are free to figure out the rest of the recipe. In one large bowl, stir together the oats, flour, brown sugar, raisins/cranberries/dried fruit, flaxseed, salt, cinnamon, and nuts. Also add in the dark chocolate chips, if you’d like.

In a separate bowl combine the oil, agave nectar, egg, and vanilla.

Pour the liquid mixture into the dry mixture and stir until evenly moistened. Spray a piece of parchment paper with canola oil spray and place it on the bottom of a 9×13 baking pan. Press the granola mixture into the parchment paper lined pan and use damp fingers to make sure its even and makes it into all the corners.

Bake 25-30 minutes or until the edges are golden brown. It’s easiest to cut these into bars once they are completely cooled, but good luck waiting that long!

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Week 47: Custard Pie

30 Nov

So I realize I’m a bit late this week. There was work, and Thanksgiving, and time off, and a trip to Plimoth Plantation, and all those types of things, so I got a little distracted. But I did take Thanksgiving as an opportunity to try something new – custard pie. I did not make this custard pie; I ordered it from the wonderful Tufts Dining Hall.

Taste of Christmas

So last Wednesday, after dropping off three boxes of food donations for the Greater Boston Food Bank, a coworker and I picked up my pie from the Dining Hall. I brought it back to the office and put it on my desk for the rest of the day. And then I brought it home and put it in the oven (the oven was off) so that Reggie the cat wouldn’t be tempted to try to eat it. (He eats lots of things including cereal, bread, lettuce, and anything that is in the garbage disposal, so I didn’t want to risk the pie.) But custard pie’s main ingredients are eggs and milk. These items need to be refrigerated. My custard pie spent the day on my desk and the night in the oven. See where this is going?

So we arrive at Thanksgiving, pie in hand, and when someone offers to take the pie, she asks, “does your pie need to go in the refrigerator?” And I just stood there like a moron and thought OH. SHIT.

Did you know that when you google, “should you refrigerate custard pie?” the answer you see in every single search result is “always”? So then the pie came thisclose to the trash. But Aunt Betty jumped in and assured us that because the milk and eggs were cooked, the pie actually didn’t need to be refrigerated. Because I really didn’t want to throw the pie away, I took Aunt Betty’s word for it against the forever-wise Google.

So I ate the custard pie and not only did I not die, I thought it tasted just fine. It was rather bland, I’d say, but good and cinnamon-y. Someone had described it as creme brule, but firmer, and I think that was pretty accurate. Now if the custard pie just had a top layer of scorched sugar, it would be my new favorite.

So Thanksgiving was a success. The pie was a success. And we even got in some quality kitty-snuggling at Andrew’s parents’ house:

 

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Week 46: Peanut Brittle

18 Nov

My friend Tomoko was visiting from San Francisco and we met at Trident to grab brunch last Saturday morning. She moved more than five years, so it was so terrific to see her again and get to catch up. It was a beautiful day and she was excited to see the foliage. We walked along Comm Ave and snapped photos of the gorgeous trees.

Tomoko brought me a box of peanut brittle from See’s Candies in San Francisco. She said she always brings it to her mom in Japan because her mom loves it too. I carried it with us as we walked along Comm Ave and then sat in a Starbucks, sipping coffees and chatting about how things have changed since we were last in Boston together. It was such a fantastic day.

I brought the box of peanut brittle home and Andrew and I broke it open a few days later. And we ate the whole box. Holy crap, peanut brittle is amazing. I’m appalled that I’ve lived all these years without it.

According to Wikipedia, you make peanut brittle by heating sugar and water. When caramelized,  peanuts, spices, and peanut butter are then mixed in. The hot candy is poured out onto a flat surface for cooling and is troweled to make it a uniform thickness. When the brittle cools, it is broken into pieces. This sounds rather complicated, so I doubt I’ll be trying it at home. But luckily, See’s Candies ships pretty much anywhere. You know what I’ll be eating this holiday season.

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Week 35: Okra

30 Aug

Last week was Restaurant Week here in Boston and Andrew and I took that opportunity to hit up EVOO in Cambridge (near Kendall). I’d heard great things about it and knew that it had just recently moved to this location, so I was eager to give it a try.

For those of you who don’t live in a city that participates in Restaurant Week, it’s a designated week when lots of restaurants offer a 3-course price fix dinner menu for $30.11 (lunch is $20.11). Restaurants love it because it gets people out to try their restaurant (and ideally come back again soon) and people love it because they get great food at a terrific price at some of the best restaurants around.

Usually Restaurant Week menus just have three choices for each section of the menu – three appetizers, three main courses, and three desserts to choose from. But EVOO had a ton of options (the host told us that that is their regular price-fix menu so they still use it for Restaurant Week). What I loved about EVOO is everything is local and super fresh. On the side of the menu, they tell you exactly where the food you are eating came from, so I knew the tomatoes in my appetizer salad had come from Kimball Farm in Pepperill, MA.

For my entree, I chose the seared sockeye salmon. It was served atop buttermilk mashed potatoes and included crispy onion slices on top.

The mashed potatoes were amazing. The crispy onions were totally like fronions (in a good way!). And the salmon was flaky and perfect. The tomato-y sauce worked perfectly with both the potatoes and the salmon and I was jazzed because it had okra in it, which I’d never had:

I first heard of okra when I saw the Sundance short, Mr. Okra. It’s a great short documentary about a man in New Orleans who sells fresh vegetables around the city. My former co-worker, who is from New Orleans, had also told me to try okra.

About.com says okra may have been brought to the US centuries ago by African slaves. It’s available year-round in the south and “can be served raw, marinated in salads or cooked on its own, and goes well with tomatoes, onions, corn, peppers, and eggplant.”

The okra in my salmon/mashed potato/crispy onion loveliness was just terrific. I’ll definitely be looking for other ways to incorporate okra into my meals and fried okra is a must for sure.

For the dessert course Andrew got salted chocolate-caramel tart with raspberries and whipped cream (too salty!) and I got the blueberry-peach crisp with almond-oat topping and sour cream ice cream (delicious – I wish I hadn’t been so full!).

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Week 34: Gooseberries

24 Aug

This was one of my standard “go to the grocery store and find some random thing to try” weeks. So I found gooseberries and in my rush out of Whole Foods, I didn’t google them to see how to eat them, I just assumed you’d eat them like grapes.

At home and ready to dive into the raw gooseberries, Andrew decided it might be best to google first. And we found barely anything about eating them raw.  One great site led us to believe that since this was later in the season and since the gooseberries were red, they would be sweeter, but most blogs and articles said gooseberries were too tart to eat raw. After the kumquat tasting incident, I thought not.

Almost  every article we found involved making gooseberry pies, crumbles, and fools (what the hell is a fool?). So, we decided it’d be best to just make a crumble because that’ll be easy, right?

At least it was easier than a pie (I like to tell myself). But we didn’t really follow the recipe exactly and that was a mistake. I can’t seem to find the recipe we used now, but as I recall it was a little confusing. It called for two pounds of gooseberries, but we just had one of those little containers that blueberries come in. So we kind of cut the recipe in half-ish and sort of winged it, assuming that more crumble would be a good thing.

But it was just kind of weird having so much crumble and so little gooseberry. And I think maybe we needed some water or liquid of some sort to make the gooseberries more smooshy; they were just kind of like warm, deflated, sour grapes. Which actually sounds really gross, but they weren’t terrible. They were tart and chewy and maybe they would have been good if they weren’t completely overwhelmed by our makeshift crumble.  At least it looked ok:

I have to try gooseberries again because after the strawberry rhubarb pie, I’m sure I can pull it together and make a pie. And this time we’ll get enough gooseberries and we won’t change the recipe around and guess and do strange things. Because gooseberries seem to be a great fruit to love – they are a good source of fiber and vitamins A and C and are known to be a powerful antioxidant. One site even says, “Among many health benefits of gooseberry, treating respiratory disorders is chief among them. Gooseberry health benefits can be credited to the high content of nutrients available in the tiny fruit that is useful in enhancing food absorption, fortifying the liver, enhancing mental functioning, and supporting cardiovascular activity, strengthening lungs, enhancing fertility, and soothing the urinary system during infections.”

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Week 28: Rhubarb

15 Jul

We spent last weekend on a Cape with an awesome group of friends. We ate like kings and drank like fish. And we ate pie. Because I’d never had strawberry rhubarb pie and one of our friends, Kari, is an amazing baker and was willing to teach me.

Rhubarb is a vegetable (but, funny story, is considered a fruit in the US because “a New York court decided in 1947 that since it was used in the United States as a fruit it was to be counted as a fruit for the purposes of regulations and duties” – wikipedia). The leaves are toxic but other parts of the plant are used for both medicinal and culinary purposes. Rhubarb stalks are look very much like celery, but have a strong tart taste. Most often, rhubarb stalks are cooked and used in pies and other foods for their tart flavor.

Kari didn’t even need a recipe to make the pie! I was incredibly impressed. We used store-bought crusts because, come on, I was on vacation and I wasn’t about to be rolling out pie dough with a cocktail in my hand.

Step 1 is to cut up the strawberries and rhubarbs, which kind of look like reddish-green celery, but in this picture actually look like sausage, don’t they?

Kari mixed together sugar, corn starch, and salt and added the mixture to the diced fruit:

This mixture is amazing because it starts breaking down the strawberries and rhubarbs and making a syrupy, sweet sauce. We let it sit for a while, stirring it occasionally to make sure it was doing its job. Then we poured the fruit and syrupy mixture into the ready pie crust and topped it with another top crust. We brushed the top crust with milk and added some sugar.

Beautiful, isn't it?

Then we baked it for 20 mins at 425 degrees, checking on it often to make sure it wasn’t burning. Then we lowered the temperature to 350 and baked for another 30 minutes or so. This was the most beautiful pie I’ve ever baked*.

Perfection

* This is the only pie I’ve ever baked

Then we let it cool and topped each slice with ice cream.

The strawberries are sweet and the rhubarbs are tart and this pie is like their beautiful, magical marriage. Simply delicious. And now that I know how to make pies, I am so all over this. Watch out friends, we are all gaining ten pounds.

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Week 27: Frozen Custard

9 Jul

The weekend of the 4th of July there are fireworks in the towns all around Boston. Andrew and I wanted to see some on Sunday night, did a quick search, and ended up in Needham. Cute little town, parking was easy, and the fireworks were great.

On our way to the field to see the fireworks we stopped to try some frozen custard at Abbott’s. I’d never had frozen custard before but had heard it was really tasty and creamier than ice cream. According to wikipedia:

Frozen custard is a cold dessert similar to ice cream, made with eggs in addition to cream and sugar. In the United States the Food and Drug Administration requires products marketed as frozen custard to contain at least 10 percent milkfat and 1.4 percent egg yolk solids. If it has fewer egg yolk solids, it is considered ice cream.

I chose a cone of strawberry and Andrew got chocolate. It was sooooooo delicious! Creamy and sweet and just wonderful. I actually liked it better than ice cream and cannot wait to find some closer to home.

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Week 18: Black Raspberry Ice Cream

7 May

We are planning an event at work and it will involve ice cream. My job today was to head to the creamery and taste several different kinds of ice cream to see which I liked best and decide which we should offer at the event. It was an obviously stressful Friday.

So my friend Sarah and I set out to White Mountain Creamery in Wellesley where we tried 6 different ice creams: coffee oreo, mint chocolate chip, holland chocolate, chocolate chip cookie dough, oreo frozen yogurt, and black raspberry chip. I’d never had black raspberry ice cream before, which is fairly hard to believe since I worked at Friendly’s in college (crazy, awesome, random, terrible job).

I of course loved my usual ice cream favorite, coffee oreo, and my used-to-be-favorite-until-I-discovered-coffee-oreo, mint chocolate chip. After trying out a frozen yogurt (oreo, which was great) and a chocolate (because every ice cream party needs a chocolate, right?), I geared up for the black raspberry chip. The owner of White Mountain Creamery told me it was pretty popular, mostly with women, and is one of the flavors that has been chosen for the event in past years. By this point we were pretty full, but I just couldn’t stop grabbing more spoonfuls of the black raspberry – I was really surprised at how much I liked it.

I like strawberry ice cream alot (aside from those annoying frozen strawberry chunks), because I like the sweet fruitiness. I loved the black raspberry for the same fruitiness but was ecstatic that it didn’t have any annoying chunks. The chocolate chips added exactly the right chocolaty kick to the fruity flavor.

Now, I don’t really see how black raspberry chip would work that well in a sundae – I think it would be the wrong flavor to be paired with fudge, peanut butter, or caramel and topped with Reese’s pieces or M&Ms, but in a dish or a cone, I think this might be my new favorite.

What? You don't eat 6 ice creams when you go out?

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