Sigh.

Thanksgiving dinner went well. It was a gluttony fest and I was happy to share it with E yet another year. The sticky rice stuffing I adored but E felt it was too sweet. Maybe I overdid the quantity of Chinese sausage or the soy. I'll continue to have to work to tweak the recipe. But now we own a huge bag of sticky rice so maybe I'll work on my rice pudding recipes next? I have a lovely one that calls for coconut milk, dried sour cherries and mangoes that I haven't made in a while.

The community servings pies were kinda well, average. I was a little disappointed in a couple of things:

1.) the crusts were clearly supermarket made. Blah to that!

2.) the apple pie sported a crumble topping that was not very crumbling. It was actually quite soggy by the time it got to us (10am in the morning on Wednesday) and had a cornstarch thickened apple filling (ala McDonald's).

I was really hoping for more. Luckily it's hard to really f up a pecan pie so I was pleased with that.

All in all it was a very nice Thursday off with the one I love the most.

So the reason for the pepto? I'm not really sure to be honest but I came home last night, ate some Trader Joe's Flaxseed Chips and then thought I was gonna die from stomach pains. It was pretty bad and pretty instantaneous and lasted almost all night.

And tonight as I was eating our turkey day leftovers I felt like everything tasted gammy and just weird. Lately my stomach and my taste buds haven't been really happy and I'm not sure what's going on. I usually have a stomach of steel and I'll happily eat just about anything. I will say that my employee's mom made me a lovely sandwich for lunch and I ate that no problem.

Sigh. I'm trying to figure out what's going on with me, food and my body these days but sometimes it feels like I'm not making much progress. E and I will be doing a juice detox later this week so hopefully that will help to reset some stuff for me.

Our Thanksgiving Day Dinner...

E and I didn't really feel like doing turkey this year so here is our T-day dinner menu:

Fried Chicken Legs
Sticky Rice Stuffing
Baby Bok Choy

Community Servings Pie (Pecan for me and Apple for E)

I'm really excited about this meal!!

I hope all of you have a really wonderful Turkey day with those you love.

Childhood is Calling?

My mom did make rice krispy treats when I was young. They were simple and seemed marginally more nutritious with the addition of rice cereal. When I went to college, our Dorm Mother (we actually had those...an adult woman who often had a family with them living in the dorm to look after us kinda like Edna Garrett on "The Facts of Life") made them for TV night but she used an entire stick of butter for one batch. They were overly rich in a way that was both addictive and kinda sickening. And when I became an adult, well rice krispies became prepackaged as a snack I'd eat during my office job. They even came in peanut butter and chocolate dipped. Certainly these were not the rice krispy treats of my past. I didn't really think much about rice krispy treats at all...

Until those commercials with the mom and kids. Oh you know the ones. They're set in black and white with the cute kid all in awe over rice krispies. Damn you marketing! So when I was in the grocery store with E today, I told her I wanted to make rice krispy treats. E proceeded to tell me that she had never had a homemade rice krispy treat to which I was both shocked and amazed. I thought everyone had had homemade rice krispy treats. Sure the packaged ones were good but nothing like the ones you made at home.

So happily I made E and me some rice krispy treats but these I decided to change a little bit. I browned the butter before melting and folding into the marshmallows and mixing in the cereal. I didn't notice a difference in the taste profile at first but asked E what she thought. She liked them a lot and said she noticed the nuttiness of taste that the brown butter brought. I decided that clearly I needed to try another taste and so tried it again. And you know what? Browning the butter is a good move. I don't think you need to add extra butter to the recipe ala adding the freshmen 15 move that my Dorm Mother did, but I do think the added step of letting the butter heat until it gets brown is a nice one. A subtle but grown up taste to something I remember from long past.

I was glad to share it with E but with a new touch that is all our own.

A Spare Tire!

After a year of carrying about 10-15 lbs more than I want, I still haven't made much progress on losing it. I have to admit that there hasn't been a lot of sacrifice on my part in regards to my eating and maybe limiting my intake of tasty things.

However, I refuse to give up on losing the poundage! I'm going to try and be a bit more mindful of what I shove into my pie trap for the next month and step on the exercise and see where it all leads me.

Hopefully I'll find my way!

XOXO

I Suck

It's been way too long since I last posted. I even had a fairly good food trip to NYC that I never got around to posting about. The store has been sucking my mine. Oh sure, I always blame it on the shop but seriously, small business owners definitely know what I'm talking about when I talk about my lack of time and energy.

So what has gotten me out of my non-posting slump? A change of seasons perhaps. Fall is certainly upon us in New England. Luckily our CSA share doesn't end until the end of October so we've gotten to see what the change in seasons brings.

Tonight we're having a couple of friends over. One is an old friend I've known forever and another is a fairly new friend I'm introducing to E. Infact the old friend asked what time for dinner, I said 8 and she said she'd be here around 6:30. That's how we roll.

So when I went to the CSA on Monday, I knew I wanted some stuff that we could cook or share with friends. I was happy to see heads of lettuce and some last of the summer cherry tomatoes. I grabbed a couple of green peppers so I could make a salad and Beth's favorite salad dressing to go with it. I also was thinking of making an apple tarte tatin. In my family, the only apples we cooked with were Granny Smiths. We're a family that really enjoys tart with our sweet. So alas no GS were to be found but they did have plums. I found this kinda cool because I always only thought of plums as an early summer or late spring fruit. I didn't know they were still even really in season. So I grabbed a container of plums and decided that I wanted to try and make Evan Kleiman's plum sour cream pie. The recipe is here.

I also really wanted to try and make an apple tarte tatin. My friend Caroline makes one every fall and she uses puff pastry dough. So I went ahead and looked for a recipe on epicurious and found this one.

So I was going to attempt two new recipes. I wasn't 100% that either would work out well. Infact, I was a bit concerned that the desserts would be a big fail but I hadn't been baking in so long that I wanted to try something new.

I started by cutting up the plums. Look how pretty!




It seemed like a lot of plums and Evan didn't really say now many. So I decided to make two pies. I ended up doubling the sour cream mixture. Unfortunately, as I was pouring the plums and sour cream into the pie crusts I started to realize that maybe there was too much sour cream stuff and should have just stayed with one pie. My hunch was confirmed because the pies took close to 2 hrs to cook. Eeek. They looked cute coming out of the oven though:



Look! Pie crust cozies, teehee. Anyway, I let the pies cool and snuck a piece. The filling wasn't right at all. It was lumpy and not sweet enough. I was kinda bummed but hoped that the ice cream a guest was bringing would help disguise the issue.

I moved into the apple tartin.


I followed the recipe down to the letter and when it came time to flip, the middle of my apple tartin was completely burned. I was so sad. I even used less time than what the recipe asked for just because I knew our oven ran hot (damn electric!)

Sigh. Well luckily, Jenny did bring ice cream that that helped. It also helped that E made an amazing pasta dinner. But E making an amazing dinner is to be expected.

Since it's fairly early in the fall season, I think I will be attempting the apple tartin again. Watch out apple tartin, I'm gonna make you my bitch for sure! ;)

Marliave Restaurant Week

Imagine yourself coming home after work on a Friday night. You plop down on the couch next to your partner in crime. "What do you want to do for dinner?" "I dunno, what do you want to do?" Imagine that this conversation gets played out over and over again over a period of 30 minutes. Sad. I know. But sometimes when you've live in a place long enough, you get so bored with everything and this includes meal options.

Luckily I remembered that a friend on Twitter had recently tweeted about her RW meal at Marliave and I've heard good things about it from my partner in crime as well. Typically, I avoid restaurants during RW because I've never had a stellar experience. The quality of the meal is average to sucky and the quality of the service really blows too. Infact, the service is why I avoid RW all together. When I go out to eat, I'd rather not be viewed with unveiled distain. I get it though. You get the odd assortment of people coming to your fine dining establishments acting like they're rock stars when infact all they are are a bunch of hacks. We sometimes get people like that in my shop as well and let me tell you, serving them is not pleasant. It's not about the cost of the meal but it's more about a certain mentality that seems to go with it at times too. So I can't imagine having to work RW for 2 weeks twice each year.

So after 30 minutes of our played out convo on the couch, I checked Open Table and saw that we could book a reservation for 9pm. Perfect. It gave us enough time to get ready and hope on the T. I decided it was time to bust out my new Manolos (see above!) and take them for a test drive. Luckily I didn't have to do much walking because walking in these shoes was not easy at all. It wasn't that they're painful but because they are so high, they pitch me forward a little too far. So walking because an interesting endeavor. I'll have to figure out how to exactly "fix" the situation with my shoes because I love them so much and refuse NOT to wear them. If I had to chose my true loves in life, I'd list: food, premium denim, insanely expensive lingerie, make-up, E and stupid expensive shoes (not in that order but close to).

Slowly, very very slowly (due to my heels) we made it to Marliave. Luckily we got there by 9pm. I have to say that I thought it was odd that I was able to get a last minute reservation on a Friday night so easily.

Hmm...sadly, E and I should have taken it as an indication of what we should expect. I was going to write up an entire review of our meal but E beat me to the punch and already did a fantastic write up here. I'll let you read her take on it because she use to work in the restaurant industry and her observations seem so keenly on point with Marliave.

Here's the thing. I wanted to like it so much. I'd heard so many wonderful things about it and their RW menu was beyond expressive in its number of offerings. But what I got to experience didn't feel like Marliave in its prime at all. Even the space felt a bit run down and not looked after too caringly. The food was decent but the attention to the experience overall wasn't good. Perhaps it can be best summed with my dessert that came to my table looking like a giant boob. I suddenly felt like E had gotten me a gag dessert from Sweet Nothings.

However it was fun to try Marliave. Although I won't be jumping at the suggestion, I'd definitely give it another shot at some point. Besides any excuse I get to show off my expensive shoe collection is always good by me!

A Quick Lactose Update

The lactose intolerance test came back positive. Explains a lot. However, doesn't explain the odd skin rashes. I still believe those are wheat related so I'm gonna ask for the blood test.

Even though I was really sad to get the test results back positive, I decided that it's not gonna keep me from living my life. For example, I had ice cream last night and didn't seem to have any issues. I have skim milk in my coffee today and everything seems good. I did skip the cheese from my egg/bacon croissant because 1.) I didn't want to press my luck 2.) I don't really care for the melted plastic texture on my sandwich.

I think I'll just be mindful of what I eat, how much I eat...Besides, isn't that what we're all suppose to do anyway?

Thanks for all the support everyone!