Creative-ish things lately

Did some holiday baking. Candied orange slices and some peel for the first time. Loved the slices but the state of my stove after making them was a sticky mess. Candied some almonds as well.

I saw an Atlas Oscura post on serpentone and thought I’d try it. Almond flour, sugar, egg whites, how hard could it be? Uh… The dough was crumblier and dryer than I expected. I might add less sugar and another egg white next time. My serpentone looked more like The Hungry Caterpillar.

Before baking.

After baking.

It puffed up more than I anticipated (egg whites, I assume). And the peel used for the tongue was inedible. Lesson learned there.

I love frangipane tarts and make them regularly during the winter. Use homemade cranberry sauce at the base, yum, and store-bought crust. Somehow when I bake them for anything other than eating at home, they are less attractive. (Like last Christmas’s poached pears on top.) This year I decided to add candied orange slices…but I should have put them on at the end of baking or after. Tasted fine but looked wonky.

Before.

After.

Also on the creative or crafty front, I tried decoupage of glass vessels. Mostly to repurpose some jars and bottles. I like it.

Need to let them cure then seal them.

My favorite scarf – the one I knitted to match a hat I fell in love with – has been lost. I know where but when I went back to the restaurant, they said no one had turned it in or found it. I think I’ve found the same yarn online and will try to remake it. Meanwhile, I’m making a navy scarf in a simple moss pattern, but the breakage is ridiculous. My fault for not using the yarn sooner, I guess?

The late, lamented scarf. 😭

Easy breakfast/brunch snack

I saw a video on social media around the holidays for an easy breakfast or brunch snack: cheese biscuits. You flatten a selection of pre-made biscuit dough, pop a chunk of cheese in the middle, then pinch it all around and shape into a ball and bake.

You could make a savory roll, but I’ve made them with blueberry-goat cheese and cranberry-cheddar. They store well and heat up in the microwave or toaster oven, so leftovers work as portable breakfast at the office.

New experiment

When looking at my budget and expenses over the last year, one thing became very clear: I spent entirely too much at a certain coffee chain. I don’t like black coffee, but do like lattes made with non-dairy milk. (And cappuccino in Italy and galão in Portugal and café manchado in Spain. But that’s a different post.) Anyway, I bought a low end espresso/latte maker and have zeroed out the chain coffee.

This morning I realized I was out of alt milk, until I remembered the condensed milk in the pantry. Good enough in a pinch, right?

Turns out this is café bombón. Too sweet for my regular morning caffeine but would be a good dessert substitute. And fine until I make it to the grocery store tomorrow. 😁

Recently made

I was looking for an easy holiday bake to take to the family meal and found this recipe (https://amp.theguardian.com/food/2021/dec/17/quick-mincemeat-apple-frangipane-strudel-recipe-benjamina-ebuehi) in The Guardian. I liked Benjamina on GBBO, didn’t realize she was doing baking stuff professionally now. Anyway, it was easy enough. But I don’t really care for cooked apples and it turns out that I really do not like mincemeat. Or at least store-bought: more cooked apples, too much clove, and raisins (I see no reason for raisins ever).

So I tried making it a second time but with pears instead, and homemade cranberry relish instead of mincemeat. Really like it, would make again. Would also maybe try something more citrus-y. Or with sour cherries.

World baking day

Twitter told me this morning that today is World Baking Day. So here is my participation bake: Nadiya Hussein’s Peanut Butter and Jelly Pancake Tray Bake. The jelly is jalapeño, which tastes delicious but doesn’t look as pretty as a red jelly would.

Note to self

Next time, permit more time for wine tasting. Two port caves per day is really my limit, but there are so many, and I won’t have time to try them all. 😍

Also: this fascinated me. Up close, it’s a bunch of mangled car parts stuck on the corner of a building for no apparent reason. A few yards away, it is clearly an Art Installation…maybe one with a message I don’t really get. But still, it’s ingenious.

And then there is this installation across from a hipster-y coffee place. Those are car tires sticking out of or affixed to the building.

(Where I had a pastry and a latte. Yum.)

January reading

I finished three books in January!  There was a time when three books read in a week would have been a slow week, but at this point of my multi-year reading slump, I’m thrilled by three in a month.

1.  The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal by KJ Charles.
2. Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine by Sarah Lohman – really interesting look at some of the more popular spices of American cooking, which aren’t all exactly what I was expecting.
3. City of the Lost by Kelley Armstrong – new mystery series, female detective as narrator, found on the new books rack at the library.  I like the premise of the book and series, but the whodunit was given pretty short shrift in the end, all TELL TELL TELL rather than show.  It was disappointing, given all of the set up, but maybe a function of being the first in a new series.  I’d be willing to try the next book in the series.

Non-book consumer-y things lately:

1. Graze – tried it after hearing an add on Gastropod (I think).  I like the ability to select flavors or block ingredients.  The weekly box is too much, but maybe every other week.  Or just buying certain snacks.  So far, my favorite snack is the cocoa orange bites, which come with green tea.
2. Third Love – bras.  Not cheap, but really comfortable and well-fitting.  Also, they ship and you have 30 days to try and return, which is not something you can generally do with bras
3. MeUndies – Xmas gift!  Love these, so comfortable.  Most of the patterns aren’t really me, but they are comfortable enough that I don’t care.

 

 

Reading for July

In addition to the books I mentioned in the last post, I managed to also read Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent.  It is the first of four books (at present) set in a fantasy world that is rather like our Earth in the 19th century but with a different date system, slightly different religion, and with dragons.  The social norms, along with geopolitics and industry, seem to be more or less lifted from Georgian to Victorian England.  On one hand, it was sort of an interesting conceit; other the other hand, it read like the diary of a privileged English woman who was an ignorant and ugly tourist, casually disregarding and stomping on other people’s beliefs, cultures, and ways of life in pursuit of her personal interests.  I finished the first book, but the beginning of the second book irritated me so much that it hit the wall.  The narrator came off as a selfish, self-indulgent twit.  Nope.

On to the next library book, a translation of Patrick Modiano’s In the Cafe of Lost Youth.

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Stopped at Poupon today for lunch and they had an amazing special.  I’m not sure if they would call it a tart or cake or what; it was a single layer cake with amarena cherries baked in and candied orange peel and slivered almonds on top.  It was amazing.  And it seemed simple enough that I could probably make it without ruining it.

They were also preparing for one of the DC farmer’s markets, beautiful puff pastry rectangles that were going to be filled with spinach and asparagus and pesto.  They looked good enough that I regretted not being able to have one for lunch…but not enough for me to schlep into DC on a day off.

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Late to the party, as usual, but I finally saw Ghostbusters.  Look, I vaguely remember seeing the first Ghostbusters as a kid with memories of nothing but the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man; rewatched as an adult, it is Just Bad.  Is this new one going to win Best Screenplay?  Nope, but it made me laugh, and I loved the ladies.  I loved that they relied on each other and defended each other and didn’t expect men to rescue them or solve their problems.  I loved that in their big fight scene, they wore fight-appropriate clothing that wasn’t gratuitously torn or slashed to show skin.  While I appreciated the flipping of the dumb blonde trope to a dumb blond, I just didn’t care about Kevin…mostly because I can never remember which Chris is which and don’t find any of them to be particularly attractive.

In terms of the Chris thing, I have a similar problem with the new Star Trek series.  I just don’t care about Kirk or Spock – I think they are both acted in a terribly wooden fashion and the Vulcan’s bowl cut does him no favors.  Give me more Uhura, more Sulu, more Bones, more of the newly introduced Jaylah, or the curiously missing Carol Marcus.

Checking in

I ended up renewing the three nonfiction books I borrowed from the library, and am inching through Frazier’s Travels in Siberia, which is quite interesting and also apropos given the weather recently.  (I hate seeing a minus before any temperature reading.)  When I dropped off the books I’d finished, I picked up a couple more:

Tristana by Benito Perez Galdos (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In by Ludmilla  Petrushevskaya (translated by Anna Summers)

I’ve been debating buying Bob McKenzie’s Hockey Confidential…but I won’t let myself until I finish Dryden’s The Game, which still languishes on my Kindle.

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In other media news, my current TV favorite is PBS’s The Great British Bake Off, which I only just discovered.  It comes across as competitive but much more collegial and pleasant than the competition shows found on the Food Network, and also as a fascinating cross-section of the British population in some ways.  I was pleased to see one of my French favorites, kouign amann, as a technical challenge, while also very surprised that none of the bakers had ever heard of or seen/eaten one before.

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In advance of foul weather, I made a pot of faux cassoulet using the recipe demonstrated over at Full Fork Ahead.  And then I walked down to Poupon to get a small supply of emergency croissants.

Apparently I’m all about the food

The Biochemist and The Chemist came to visit over the holidays, which was lovely.  I always appreciate the opportunity to cling and be ridiculous.  While we were plotting out what we wanted to do on different days, we wound up arranging things entirely by which restaurants we wanted to try to revisit (important info: Petit Louis is *always* on the itinerary).  Which, uh, we don’t really do that, do we?

Except I was planning a weekend roadtrip for March and realized that I was doing exactly the same thing.  This event is at this hour in this location, which restaurants are nearby that my colleague from that town recommended.

So apparently *I* do that.  And I’m all about the food when traveling.

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Unrelated, I had begun to tentatively plan a trip to Istanbul for this year.  A friend went last year and came back with wonderful tales and then handed me his guidebook.  Well, twist my arm.  It was on my bucket list, after all.  I’d read a bunch of security/travel blogs and checked out the State Dept warnings site but was feeling generally okay about visiting.  Today’s news of a suicide bomber in one of Istanbul’s tourist areas is making me hesitate.  It feels wimpy to say that but…I’m not sure what to do right now.  Maybe sleep on it and do more research.