We went to Traif again. Damn, I love beets.
Colors are weirdly muted in these. I need to go back and fix them. :\
Last month a bunch of my friends and I went to Spot Dessert Bar in the East Village. As you can see, it was pretty awesome.
Connecticut style lobster roll from the Red Hook Lobster Pound truck at Saturday’s PARKED! food truck fest.
Beef tartare with marrow, quail egg, upland cress (the greens), and some sort of spicy sauce with apples in it. It was pretty amazing.
RC thought my photographing took too long. “Hurry up and take it, before I put bunny ears on it!”:
This past weekend was Spring Carnival at Carnegie Mellon University. Friends visiting Pittsburgh means going out to eat. RC found Salt of the Earth so we went there after dinner at Abay
This drink that a bunch of us had was the vodka cocktail. It basically tasted like an alcoholic flower garden exploded in your mouth.
Pork soup dumplings/buns, called guan tang bao (灌汤包) or xiao long bao (小笼包), depending on where in China you’re from. I’m half and half, I guess. (My mom’s side’s from Hebei & Xi’an, my dad’s side is from Shanghai, and I was born in Henan.)
-March 2011 @ Joe’s Shanghai in Chinatown, NYC
Thank god for banana bread or else I would waste so much money on bananas that go bad due to my slow rate of banana consumption.
Base recipe’s from Epicurious, but my final recipe was:
- 4-5 overripe bananas
- 1 stick melted butter (going to try only 1/2 stick next time)
- 1/2 cup brown, 1/2 cup white sugar (going to do only 1/4 cup white sugar next time)
- 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
- 1/2 cup white flour
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
- 1/4 tsp ground ginger
- handful of chopped walnuts
- handful of blueberries
1) Preheat oven to 350F
2) Mix wet ingredients together (mash bananas well before mixing other wet ingredients in!); mix dry ingredients, walnuts, and blueberries together.
3) Mix wet & dry ingredients together until everything is wet. DO NOT OVERMIX!
4) Pour into bread pan (either line pan w/ parchment paper or butter the bottom & sides so it doesn’t stick).
* optional: stick a bunch of chopped walnuts on top of dough so it bakes out crunchy (like I’ve got in the photo); sprinkle brown sugar on top if you’d like.
5) Bake for about an hour. It took me about 1 hr 15 min. At the 1 hr mark, see if knife comes out clean when stuck into center of bread.
* If you want to eat it right out of the oven, that’s fine. Just realize that it’ll be VERY VERY CRUMBLY. If you let it sit for a couple of hours, it’ll firm up properly. Overnight, it’ll firm up into a real bread/cake consistency.
* Store in plastic bag.
Despite my haphazard way with recipes, this broiled mussels recipe from Smitten Kitchen came out fantastic. I’m pretty sure it’s the garlic & butter.
