Chai Tea Mix

Beloved readers, I’m going to be straight with you for a moment. It is bloody freezing here in the Netherlands. When I imagine winter, while I’m sweating on the beach in July, I think of beautiful snow covered landscapes and mugs filled with warm hot chocolate. Wrapped up in a warm and colorful sweater, I imagine winter to be a wonderful thing. But the truth is – winter sucks. Sure you can eat soup every day. But does that really justify how miserable it is to go outside? Nobody told me winter in the Netherlands doesn’t mean snow – it means rain. Freezing cold rain that makes your face feel like it is covered in ice because probably it is.

There are cures for this wretched season. Summer is one of them. But a much faster one is tea. Today’s remedy is not just any tea, it is homemade chai tea. This isn’t just water with a bunch of leaves soaking in it. It is water with a bunch of leaves and toasted spices soaking in it. Plus some nice creamy milk and some sugar. This is a warm and comforting heaven. Unfortunately, this heaven is also calorie-laden which means feel free to skip the milk and the sugar if you are that kind of person. (Note: I am not that kind of person)

Chai Tea Mix

1 cups loose black tea
30 cardamom pods
6 star anise seed pods
3 tsp rainbow peppercorns (meaning a mix of all different colored ones. But you could just one color too)
1 Tbsp whole cloves
2 Tbsp fennel seeds
3 cinnamon sticks
2 tsp coriander seeds
candied ginger

I like my chai tea full of yummy spicy flavor! If you don’t know what you like, I would recommend making this as I have prescribed and then if it is too strong for you, add more black tea to dilute the spices. Or if it is too weak for you, up whichever spices you want until you are happy.

Toast all of your spices in an oven set to 350* F for 5-10 minutes or until they start to smell awesome. Once your kitchen is filled with delicious fragrance, take the spices out of the oven and chop them up on a cutting board. Try to cut them into pieces that are as small as possible – especially the cardamom, cinnamon and star anise.

Chop up the candied ginger as well. You can chop as much as you want. I went with 6 or 7 tablespoons of chopped ginger for my tea.

Mix all of this with the black tea and look at how beautiful and nice smelling it is!

To brew: Steep for about 5 minutes in 1 cup of hot water. Add 1/2 cup of milk (whole, fat free, soy, almond, rice, hemp, human, whatever) and stir in as much sugar (or honey, or agave… you get the picture) as you would like.

This would be great as a gift. Placed in a nice jar with instructions for brewing it will look nicer than most things you could buy at the same cost of all the ingredients. This recipe makes enough to fill about two jam jars. The boyfriend and I gave one away for Christmas and happily drank one down ourselves.

Nutty Chocolate Bark

Dear All: I have decided to start updating this blog again. I’ve been less motivated due to being a busy grad student/having too much fun with the boyfriend/being a lazy ass. Guess which one is the most responsible? If I fall off track, and you care at all, feel free to send me a guilt-inducing comment/e-mail rachelmade@gmail.com to motivate me to no longer leave you hanging.

Even though my kitchen is ridiculously small – to the point where a cutting board does not even fit on the counter – and quite ill equipt, wonderful boyfriend and I, as budding evolutionary biologists have managed to adapt to our new surroundings. Believe it or not! I have been taking pictures of some of the awesome things we’ve been making. I just… you know… haven’t been taking the time to edit the photos or write the blog posts about them so that you, the reader, can benefit from our kitchen exploits. I was busy doing really important things like uh… watch more movies than anyone person ever should, attempt to eat my body weight in chocolate and occasionally, socialize or do productive work-related things. You know, typical graduate student activities.

Let’s get back to the topic at hand – the damn recipe and why it exists! An intro: here in the Netherlands they celebrate Sinterklaas as well as Christmas. The story is…  kinda kooky. I won’t go in to any details here. I will instead refer you to one of the great modern essayists, David Sedaris and his story of Sinterklaas: Six to Eight Black Men. Regardless of the kookiness, the Christmas/Sinterklaas/whatever is always fun to celebrate and in light of this, my fellow graduate students and I decided to exchange gifts. We were all to bring in 3 gifts totaling about 10 euros altogether. Well, to me, I don’t think it’s possible to buy three nice things for that little money so I decided to make my gifts.

As an incredibly humble and wonderful person who is just perfect in every way, you know that it is hard for me to say this but… every gift came out hyper-awesome. They were all a blast to make as well. Unfortunately, as things go around the holidays, our gift exchange plans fell through. But worry not, faithful readers! The gifts I made were either given to a lovely someone or consumed by me and my wonderful boyfriend. Waste not, want not.

So I will start with the gift that was nearest and dearest to my cholesterol-clogged heart: some chocolate bark. I must say, this was by far the most fun and messiest gift to make which can be evidenced by the fact that I am still finding chocolate in random places throughout my apartment (including my ever-growing ass).

Nutty Chocolate Bark

Big bar of milk chocolate
Big bar of dark chocolate
Smaller bar of white chocolate (unless you really like white chocolate)
Assorted, unsalted nuts

This is unbelievably simple. It is so simple it’s actually hard for me to give you the procedure in more than 4 sentences, but I’ll try so that it makes it look like I actually did something impressive.

Line a baking pan with wax paper, this will be the mold for your bark. I recommended three types of chocolate, but you can use just one, or two, or more than three if you want. You can also tweak the amounts to suit your own liking. I’ll just walk you through how I did it this one time.

Melt the different kinds of chocolate in separate bowls. I did all of mine in the microwave by heating for 30 seconds and then stirring and repeating until it was pure liquid goodness.

Pour the melted milk chocolate and dark chocolate into the pan. The more crazy you get the more beautiful this will be. If you want to keep them each on one side because you’re a control freak, go ahead. If you want to be awesome and fun, you can throw them all over the place or mix them together with the tip of a knife. Save a little of the chocolate in the bowls for later.

Pour the bit of white chocolate over this dark/milk mix and stir it around with the tip of a knife. Take your nuts and press them in to the chocolate. I used some mixed nuts that I got from my yummy bulk food store but you could stick to just a few kinds. Press them in all over the place!

Then with the remaining little bits of chocolate you saved, dip a spoon in and then splatter it across your ‘canvas’ of chocolate. Go crazy! Try to channel Jackson Pollack as you go. In the end, it may look something like this…

Give me a moment to pick my jaw up off the floor…

Alright, let’s move on! Pop that bad boy in the fridge so it can dry faster. Once it is really dry – and I mean really really really dry not just about dry. It will be tempting to confuse the two, but do yourself a favor and don’t. If you’re having trouble waiting for it to dry, do what I did and clean up the tasty way:

It might terrify your boyfriend but whatever… you can remind him that you’re a mature and respectable person some other time and things will be A-okay.

Once it has really dried in such a way that it is actually dry, break that sucker up! Into uneven and mishappen pieces – it looks way better that way. Put in a nice box and give to someone you love or do what I ended up doing and eat them all with someone you love.

Remember that you can customize this as much as you want. I imagine adding dried fruits would be a delicious addition. Some chili powder or cinnamon mixed in with the melted chocolate during the melting process also sounds pretty delicious to me. Any other ideas?

Goodbye for now! I’ll be back soon but in the meantime, I need a shower.

Eggless Cinnamon-Banana Pancakes!

Oh hello… What gives with all the radio silence lately, you ask? Well, things have been crazy busy for a long while now. Since we last spoke, I packed up my stuff and moved from New York City to The Netherlands to start graduate school. I moved in with my wonderful boyfriend and have been trying to adjust to a Dutch way of life which has been very great. Bicycle riding everywhere, eating loads of cheese, buying time with hookers, etc.

The hardest thing for me here is: NO OVENS! It seems like it is an extreme rarity to have an oven in your apartment here. The boyfriend and I have been living here for months now and have been learning to live without an oven. We’ve made things like microwave cake, skillet breads, etc. It’s been hard, but it’s really not all bad. We have been living like kings here. I won’t say that Europe is a vegetarian’s paradise, because it really really isn’t… but there are amazing green markets here with all sorts of delicious produce, so we cook everything for ourselves and it is great.

This morning, to celebrate completing our second graduate course, Phylogenetics and Genomics in Ecology, we slept in until noon and then made these beauties!

I replaced the eggs in these babies with half of a mashed up banana. It was partially to make these banana pancakes extra pancakey and partially because we didn’t have any eggs and neither of us felt like getting dressed and going to the grocery store.

There are a couple other special things about these pancakes… besides having the banana slices cooked into them instead of just laid on top of them, they have loads of cinnamon in them and were made with a milk-vinegar mixture instead of buttermilk (because I don’t know what the dutch word for buttermilk is and therefore can’t buy it in a store!). But actually, replacing the buttermilk with milk-vinegar I think makes a much better pancake. They are much fluffier and way less dense. So maybe that makes them healthier, but for sure it makes them tastier.

Alright, here you have it folks. Let’s get in to the nitty gritty:

Banana Cinnamon Pancakes

1.5 bananas
1 tbsp cinnamon (plus a little extra for sprinkling)
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 tbs butter
3/4 cup milk
2 tbs white vinegar

1. Mix the vinegar with the milk and let sit for a few minutes so that the milk can curdle. It sounds gross, I know… but it isn’t. This is how cheese is made, afterall! So it can’t be all bad.

2. While that’s going on, melt the butter and mash half of a banana. Then mix all of the ingredients together (except for that one banana).

3. Dump the curdled milk-vinegar mixture into all the other ingredients and stir until very smooth – get all the lumps out!

4. Let it sit for ~15 minutes (sometimes I do as much as 30!) to have time to get all bubbly – this is what will make your pancakes super fluffy. You want to actually see bubbles formed on top.

5. Chop up the one banana in thin slices and sprinkle with a little bit of your extra sprinkling cinnamon.

6. Put a little bit of oil in a skillet and heat over a medium-low flame. Drop in however much batter you would like. I do about a fourth of the batter per pancake.

7. Once little bubbles start to form on the top of the pancake, it is ready for flipping! Before you do so, plop as many little banana slices as you can on top. I like lots of bananas so I really cover the thing. Once covered, then you can flip! Cook until done. The bananas should get all caramelized and delicious… yummo!

8. Serve warm with a little bit of honey and a glass of milk.

Spicy Minestrone Soup

Fancy seeing you here. Fancy seeing me here, you say? Well… that’s cute. Clever too.

In all seriousness though, I am sorry about the gigantic gap in posts. I have been cooking up so delicious things, and I have finally recovered the desire to take pictures of them and record them here. So hopefully my next post will come much sooner.

If you’re like me (miserably cold in New York City) then you are feeling particularly annoyed that the city decided to tease us with some beautiful warm weather only to despicably flash back to wet, cold and windy – an awful mix. To help fight off these wtf-it’s-supposed-to-be-spring blues, we have a new weapon! It’s healthy, it’s heavy, it’s warm… it’s soup! The best soup ever. Chock full of vegetables and yielding a pretty decent kick of spice, this soup will keep you nice and warm for hours and hours. This is way way better than your typical minestrone, trust me.

I hope you like it

Spicy Minestrone Soup

Olive Oil
5 cloves garlic, minced
1 onion, chopped
3 carrots, diced
3 celery sticks, diced
1 medium yellow squash, diced
1 medium zucchini, diced
28 oz can peeled tomatoes
Your favorite brand of red chile paste
5 cups of vegetable stock
1.5 cups pasta
2 cups spinach
1 bunch basil
salt
pepper
dried oregano

Saute the garlic and onion in oil until the onion starts to get tender. Add in the carrots and celery until the celery starts to get tender. Toss in the squash and saute until fully cooked.

Chop up the canned tomatoes and add them, along with any juice, into the pot. Add as much of the chile paste as you want. You can also use red pepper flakes to give this a nice little kick. Dump in the vegetable broth, pasta and spinach. Bring to a boil. Add in the basil and as much salt, pepper and oregano as you fancy. Let simmer for 10-15 minutes or until the pasta is fully cooked.

Serve with some good bread and watch your mouth try to do a cartwheel with delight.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, blogonauts!

I hope you all had a great 2010 and are gearing up for an even better 2011. It is a great time to reflect on the past year and look forward to what the current year may bring. For many, this is also a time for resolutions/goals/etc. I tend to look at New Year’s as just another day. The most important thing I take away from it is having to remember that I need to write 2011 on things now. So, while I feel that any day is a great day to start out fresh, I don’t hold it against anyone that likes to wait until January 1st.

2010 was pretty good to me. I graduated from University, got a job, met some great people, tried interesting foods, started this blog, started dating an amazing person and probably did some other stuff I can’t really remember. There was also the bad stuff of course – both human and canine family sickness, fell out of touch with people and too much stress and worry.

If I were to pick a resolution for this year it would be to stress/worry less. Today I read on another blog that I love that fear stands for false evidence appearing real. I like this a lot. Especially since I think stress/worry is caused by fear and I can’t think of a single time where stress and worry were either warranted or helpful. Reminding myself of this new definition of fear is helpful.

Of course, more than just reminding myself, I am trying to turn to exercise, healthy food and organization to keep me in the right frame of my mind. And wouldntchaknow… it’s working! (duh) It’s all about balance. Regardless of what you want for yourself this year, balance is key. Being happy and healthy opens the doors to lots of things.

So my first post of the new year will be quite healthy. The photo, however, will be quite boring and unappealing.

Fruit and Kefir Smoothie

1 banana
1 cup of frozen strawberries
1 cup of kefir
2 scoops of chocolate soy powder
teensy bit o’ honey

These directions are really simple: blend the first four ingredients together. Give it a sip. If it’s a bit sour for you – that darn kefir! – add a little honey. Blend again. Sip again. Need more honey? Add a little more. Repeat until your smile is big.

This was my first time ever trying kefir. It’s supposed to be very good for you. This remains to be seen… One thing I am sure of, however, is that it sure is sour. I think I added about half a tablespoon of honey. But once I did, this was amazingly delicious! And filling! And proteinerific! (That’s a word. Sure. Why not?)

Happy Birthday Cake

I have this one cake recipe. It’s pretty great. When something really special comes up, this is the recipe I go to. And well… something special came up.

It’s a bit more involved than just buying a chocolate cake mix and adding eggs and oil. But it’s also approximately 42 times better than anything a cake mix could ever produce. (If that doesn’t sound like enough times better to justify the extra work, think about it like this: 42 is the meaning of life. Perhaps this cake will give your life meaning? Something like that. Just take my word for it and bake this!) And while baking anything for someone shows that you care, baking from scratch shows that you love. Make a cake for someone, and you aren’t just giving them a cake. You’re giving them your devotion – the time you spent making the cake as well as the love you put into it.

Wow! That was cheesy. Regardless, I think it’s all true.

And so while usually this cake is just, the world’s greatest devil’s food cake with coconut buttercream frosting… Today, it is Pan’s happy birthday cake.

Hopefully you get the little joke in the name.*

Chocolate Cake with Coconut Buttercream Frosting

Cake:
1 cup boiling water
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 lb softened unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups packed brown sugar
3/4 cups white sugar
4 eggs

Frosting:
1 cup softened unsalted butter
3 tsp coconut extract
4 cups sifted confectioner’s sugar
4 Tbs whole milk

Whisk boiling water and cocoa powder until smooth. Whisk in the milk and vanilla. Meanwhile! (imagine I just said that as the narrator of a dramatic radio show from the 50s) sift the flour, baking soda and salt together in a separate bowl.

Cream the butter and sugars in a large bowl until it’s nice and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time.

Add in the cocoa and flour mixes in three batches. This is just to keep things from getting messy and going crazy. Because trust me, if you do this all at once, it will get crazy.

MAXIMUM CAKE PREP PROCEDURES: (did that excite you?)

Place oven racks in the upper and lower third of the oven. Preheat to 350* F. Grease three 8″ diameter cake pans. Cut out a circle of parchment paper and place it on the bottom of each pan. I recently discovered that if you do this, when you tip the cakes out of the pan, you lower your risk of having these cakes break up on you. Having a cake this good fall apart on you is pretty heart breaking. This cake is real good. It will taste good broken. But it deserves more, don’t you think?

Bake for 20-25 minutes. Switch the top and bottom pans halfway through baking.

Let cool for 10 minutes before taking out of the pans. Let cool completely before frosting.

Frosting time!

Cream the softened butter and then slowly add in confectioner’s sugar. Beat until fully incorporated and then add the coconut extract and milk. Beat for an additional three minutes.

Frost cake as nicely as you can. As you can see from my picture, I was in a rush and didn’t bother with a crumb coat or any of those other things people do to make their cakes pretty. It wasn’t very nice to the cake… but the birthday boy showed up early with an empty belly.

Now for some cakey fun!

It just looked too good to resist licking. I have a problem. I’m a 5 year old girl stuck in a 21 year old girl’s body. I don’t need help. Just awareness.

Awesome shirt due to my rad photoshop skills and my desire to keep this blog PG-13. Also, I like to embarrass the people I love. Again, 5 years old…

 

* the incredibly lame joke is that the cake itself is happy. And it is a birthday cake. Have you caught on to my true age yet?

A Hat!

I have been knitting since I was… I don’t know. Eight? Nine? Ten? Something like that. I remember when my neighbor, one of the greatest women on Earth, taught me how to knit. She taught me a lot of things, but I can remember her teaching me how to knit most vividly. I remember her hands guiding mine, showing me how to go with the flow using my needles. I loved it. I could take string and make beautiful patterns with it. Magic! As soon as I got the hang of it, I set to work on my first scarf.

It took me four months to complete…

She got sick right after that. I never learned anything more than how to make a scarf. Even years after her death, I still haven’t learned anything more than how to make a scarf. And trust me, I can pound the scarves out by now. I must have at least twenty scarves in my closet right now. They all look exactly the same. The way that she taught me.

But finally, the time has come for me to move on with my knitting. I learned how to do new kinds of stitches. How to reduce, add, stitch, etc. I learned that there are different kinds of knitting. And it’s all just so cool.

So now, with these new found skills, I have made a hat. I have actually made three hats. And to show my marked improvement over my much younger knitting self, each hat took one night. Hats are, of course, quite a bit smaller than scarves. But I still feel quite accomplished.

A Hat

Don’t I look accomplished? Sorry about the poor quality. This photo comes to you courtesy of Apple’s Photobooth App. It’s not known for it’s high resolution. It is quite handy though. I dig

I’m not sure how much you all know about knitting. I never knew how to read a pattern, but now I do. So I will show off!

Size 8 Needles
1 skein Country Loom Yarn
1 yarn needle
Scissors

CO 56 stitches.
Work 29 rows in k2p2
Crown:
R1: *k2tog,p2* to end – 42 sts.
R2: *k2tog,p1* to end – 28 sts.
R3: *k1p1* to end
R4: *k1p1* to end
R5: *k2tog* to end – 14 sts
R6: *k2tog* to end – 7 sts

Cut yarn leaving at least 20″ long tail. Thread needle through live stitches. Pull them tight and slide off knitting needle. With RS facing you, sew back seam from top to bottom using mattress stitch. Sew in ends.

One size fits all.

Here is the hat in the wild. See how warm and attractive it makes you?

Was that pattern confusing to you? I can certainly understand how the abbreviations can easily throw you off. It’s actually quite easy. Prepare for a translation!

Are you prepared? Ok, good. Here goes:

CO means cast-on. The next step means to knit 29 rows in a stockinette stitch (knit two stitches then purl two stitches, repeat). The Rs followed by a number are just the names of the rows in the crown – these are the rows that come after those 29 you just knitted. the *s mean to knit everything in between them repeatedly. Sometimes there will be a number following the *s which tell you how many times to repeat those stitches. In this case, you’re going to repeat it for the entire row. k2tog means ‘knit two together.’ Basically, instead of knitting one stitch per loop on your needle, you’re going to knit one stitch per two loops on the needle. It’s not so hard, trust me.

If you don’t know how to do any of these stitches/moves, look them up online. There are tons of easy resources that can show you how. Many have videos.

OR! If you’re really keen, let me know and I can post some tutorials on here.

Stay toasty

Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls

Did you all have a good Thanksgiving? I had a fantastic one.

This post will be a bit quick. But I thought it might be just a bit useful. Perhaps you planned on making a pumpkin cheesecake and then somebody declared the pumpkin sucks and apples don’t – so you made an apple pie. Not that that happened to me or anything… Or maybe you just bought a bit too much pumpkin puree and are now looking for something to do with the extra.

Well look no more! Because the answer is here. The answer is: pumpkin cinnamon rolls with a brown sugar glaze. Hey, that sounds pretty good, huh? Well, that’s because it is. Yup. And we have the lovely folks over at The Kitchn to thank for this deliciousness.

These puppies are right tasty. A little bit crunchy on the outside, and soft/gooey on the inside. Not too sweet, either. They are just perfect.

Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls

Rolls:
1/4 cup warm water
1 Tbs yeast
1 cup milk
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
15-ounce can pumpkin puree
1 1/2 tsp kosher salt
5 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup butter
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

Glaze:
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup milk
1 cup brown sugar
pinch salt
2 1/2 cups powdered sugar

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water with just a sprinkle of the sugar. Let it sit until the yeast has dissolved and the water is a bit bubbly – several minutes.

Heat the milk and butter in a sauce pan until the butter has dissolved. Combine this with the sugar and let the sugar fully dissolved. When the mixture is warm to the touch (read: not hot. read: not melting your skin off), stir in the yeast and the pumpkin. Mix this up real well and then add the salt and flour. Mix this all up until it becomes homogenous and forms a nice shaggy dough-ball. That’s a term. Why not? Cover and let this rise until it doubles (1-3 hours.)

Punch the dough down and depending on your time frame – refrigerate it overnight to finish tomorrow or move on with the recipe.

Put some flour down and then roll the dough out into a long rectangle ~1/2″ thick. Melt the butter and then stir in the spices and sugar. Spread this all over the exposed side of the dough. Slowly and carefully roll the dough into a long rectangle. Cut this cylinder into 1 1/2″ long pieces – these will be your yummy rolls. Put these onto a greased baking dish with a bit of room in between each roll. They’re gonna spread a bit. Cover them and let rise for 30 minutes (or 1 hour if the dough has been refrigerated).

Bake at 375* F for 20 minutes or until golden-brown. While the rolls are baking, we can go ahead and make some tasty glaze.

Over a medium flame, plop the butter and pour the milk into a saucepan. When the butter has melted, add in the sugar and salt. Heat until the sugar has melted. Remove from heat and stir in the powdered sugar. Yum yum yum.

When the rolls are done, take em out of the oven and let sit for ~5 minutes. Then pour your awesome glaze all over these bad boys. make sure to get it in all the nooks and crannies for a particularly delightful sugary treat.

Just look at it! Amazing

Murray’s Cheese

We went down to the West Village the other day to walk around and take photos. This was the absolute worst day to not have an appetite. Everywhere we went there were tasty looking restaurants, bakeries, cafes, etc. But I just couldn’t justify sitting down and getting food when my stomach was declaring ‘No Vacancy.’

So we just looked. My eyes sure were full by the end of the day (corniest sentence I have ever written? Perhaps). Before we left, we decided to go to Murray’s Cheese Shop. This was a wonderful brilliant genius awesome super grovvy idea. a) because we got to try tiny bits of yummy cheese and take home larger bits to eat when our apetites did appear and b) we got to learn a lot about cheese.

Our wonderful cheesemonger (who sounded exactly like Cricket from It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia – seriously. It was creepy) taught us about the different kinds of cheese rinds – bloomy, washed and natural. The different kinds of milk commonly used for making cheese – cow, goat, sheep and buffalo. And took us on a super groovy cheese tour. Starting at a nice simple soft cow cheese and going all the way to the most pungest, sour, etc. blue cheese I have or will ever eat. That thing smacked you harder than a doctor would an unmoving newborn.

Part of me wants to tell you all the interesting little things that he told us, but then another part of me feels bad about the thought of potentially denying Murray’s some new customers. There to eat and learn. That part also fears that I have forgotten too much of this guy’s interesting, cheesy tidbits that I would be doing you a disservice in repeating them to you, my loyal readers, in a watered down format.

I will say this: the level of fattiness by order of milk provider is Buffalo>Sheep>Cow>Goat. Perhaps not surprisingly, the order of deliciousness, when eating a nice creamy soft cheese is: Buffalo>Sheep>Cow>Goat. We tried an incredible soft cheese made with Water Buffalo milk. ZOMG it was fantastic.

So, please get thee to a cheesery as soon as possible. I recommend Murray’s, but if you are not in NYC then go wherever you can. And if you don’t have a brilliant cheesemonger that sounds like Cricket at your disposal, check out About.com’s cheese page. It’s quite good.

So… this post may have been useless. But hopefully it inspired you to eat something decadent.

This is how we set our bounty up that night:

AWWWW YEAAAAAH! Is what you’re probably thinking right now.

Yes, you aren’t imagining things. That is, in a clockwise order of appearance, starting from the right: amazing goat cheese with a natural rind, a great spanish cow’s cheese and a holy-buffalo delicious water buffalo cheese. Followed by rockin’ raspberry preserves, pineapple, yummo grapes, dark chocolate chips (yeah…) and some tasty bread. If that doesn’t spell delicious and romantic dinner, nothing does. Except for those letters used to spell the actual phrase – delicious and romantic dinner.

But let’s not go there.

Apple Tart

Fall has fallen upon us. It landed pretty hard. Our backs hurt a little from the impact, but we won’t hold it against Fall. After all, what is the use in holding a grudge against a season? You’re just going to make yourself miserable for several months each year. The point: it’s not worth it. (This is me tricking you into not noticing that I disappeared for two months. Don’t expect an explanation. You won’t get one.*)

One of my friends recently finished up his dissertation for Columbia University. (Not an easy feat, let me tell you. Not that I know. But I can imagine based on observations.) As a bit of a congratulations, I made him some apple tarts and ice cream.

A bit of explanation. He was studying threatened Amazonian freshwater turtles and I helped him a lot with some of his hemoparasite work. So, in honor of all this, I made him green ice cream and turtle slash infected blood cell tart. I won’t discuss the ice cream here, as it is just a simple vanilla ice cream with lots of food coloring mixed in to turn it sickly green.

Let’s just dive straight into the pie, shall we?

Turtle Nerdgasm Tart

2.5 cups all-purpose flour
pinch of salt
6 Tbs sugar
18 Tbs butter
2 egg yolks
5 Tbs ice-cold water
8 golden delicious apples, peeled and thinly sliced
4 Tbs brown sugar
Cinnamon

Combine the flour, salt and sugar (but not the brown sugar). Cut the butter into chunks and add it along with the egg yolks into the flour mix. Stir until well mixed. Add in the ice water until you can gather the dough up into a ball. You don’t have to add all the water to do this. You could also add more than the 5 Tbs if need be. Refrigerate this dough for one hour.

Preheat the oven to 400* F.

Now, I’m going to give you the directions for my shape tarts. But really, as these are free form tarts, you can make them into circles or whatever shape you want. Here we go!

Smush the dough out flat onto a cookie sheet. Cut into the shape of a large adorable turtle. Smush more dough out flat onto another cookie sheet in the shape of an oval. Mix the apples with the brown sugar and as much cinnamon as you would like. Arrange the apple slices on the turtle and the blood cell as prettily as you feel like. Roll the outside dough over the apples on the edge, giving it all a nice rim. You can also take this opportunity to clean the shapes up a bit.

Now for the RBC (red blood cell) bits. As this is a reptilian RBC, it is nucleated. I don’t care if this means nothing to you – I’m saying it anyway! So… go ahead and make a small little ball out of dough and flatten that sucker out. Plop it right into the middle of the RBC. Make a slightly bigger ball of dough and then flatten out into the shape of a jelly bean this time. Place it lovingly next to the nucleus. This is a hemogregarine, one of many blood parasites found in these turtles. Don’t those look cute? (Answer: they do).

Bake for 30 minutes and serve with green ice cream. Because… well, why not?

BTW – my apologies for the POS picture. I’ve had a lot of tech issues lately. My computer completely broke. I lost all my files. It sucked. So many food pictures disappeared. My camera also broke. Which also sucked. Then on top of things… I went through a break up. Then I went through the beginnings of a new relationship. It’s all pretty nuts. These days sure have been busy. Anyway! This was taken with my iphone. Hopefully my cool blue sneakers and pretty colorful skirt included free of charge in this shot will cheer y’all up. If not, get over it. I got a dSLR recently so nice photos will come soon.

Until then, keep on smiling.

 

* This was a lie