Hypnotized
The farmer’s markets are filled to the brim with goodness. Corn that’s as sweet as candy, juicy, heirloom tomatoes, and deep, dark eggplant. When I shop at the farmer’s market I usually go with a list, but sometimes I get hypnotized and pick up things that I have no idea what to do with. Eggplant is one of them. I have one main recipe that I make with eggplant but I was craving that Chinese fast food, eggplant with garlic sauce. After doing a quick little search online, I found one that seemed fast and simple. I also added up some green beans that I had in my produce drawer to add a crunch to the mushy eggplant.
Something I learned in my research, make sure to salt your chopped up eggplant with salt to rid it of its extra moisture and bitterness. But unlike me, rinse before cooking! Unfortunately I didn’t do this and needed quite a few glasses of water after.
uno… dos… tres, TRES leches. muhahaha
Oh, we know, we’ve been gone forever. What the hell have we been doing with our lives other than cooking and blogging about it right??? We’re bad bloggers, but seriously, the heat is killing us… literally, every moment we turn the gas burner, the oven, even the toaster on, it makes us shrivel up a little bit more.
Enough of the complaining, because we’ve got tres leches cake for you (tres, TRES LECHES, muhahahha) and hopefully that should make up for it. (please?)
Tres Leches cake is cake sopped full of sweet milk infused with cinnamon and cardamom. Yes, the original version is a soggy cake but since we don’t like soggy cake we changed it up a little. Isn’t that the best part of being your own chef, the fact that you can make something your own? In this version, we didn’t let the cake soak over night in the milk but rather soak for a couple of hours just to get the right amount of wetness. We added some cinnamon whipped cream and strawberries to top it all off and lick our plates clean. We think the cinnamon whipped cream was the key to this cake. Continue reading uno… dos… tres, TRES leches. muhahaha…
You scream, I scream
Is it hot where you are, because here in New York, its pretty steamy! Did you say its time for ice cream?? Why yes, we agree completely! How about an ice cream cake? Or even better, an ice cream cake fashioned after a banana split?! Yes, that’s what we’re making today. Recently, we purchased 2 mini cake pans and we’ve been on a bit of a cake kick. The inaugural bake with the pans we made a carrot cake for Pinky’s (Caroline’s dog) birthday, because yes, she loves carrots, but no, she was not allowed to eat any. Continue reading You scream, I scream…
Packt like sardines in a crushed tin box
Philly Homegrown, a project grown out of the Philadelphia tourism group that promotes local eats, recently sent a batch of artisanal goodies. It included stuff like pasta, Jersey grown canned tomatoes, honey, cheese, and salami. We love Philly and they seem to like us and we’re always down to try something new.
Since we got a bunch of pasta, we decided to make a pasta dish, something different so we went with sardines and bread crumbs. Sardines can seem a bit gross, its like anchovies, it gets a bad rap. But use them properly and they add extra flavor and depth. This dish is light and easy, the bread crumbs add a crunch and texture. Its a perfect meal to make on busy weeknight. Thanks Philly for feeding us!
Continue reading Packt like sardines in a crushed tin box…
BOO YAH!
So a couple weeks ago we asked our friend and favorite chef, Corey, to give us a lesson in knife skills. Among the basics of julienne-ing, slicing, dicing, tourneau-ing we also learned how to fillet a fish and sharpen a knife! As a way of saying “thank you,” we decided to cook Corey dinner. Now, this isn’t all too easy being that Corey is a way better cook than us and a little bit of a control freak in the kitchen. Basically, it ended up with Corey cooking for us while we did the prep… THANKS COREY!
Black Swan, White Swan
For Oscar night, we threw a “Oscar-themed” party. (We know, this is SOOOO late.) But some of the things we made for that night were so delicious (and witty, if we do say so ourselves) that we thought it was still worth sharing. We chose 5 out of the 10 best picture nominees and made a food item based on the film. For Black Swan, we made a homemade mallomars, a white fluffy marshmallow on the inside covered with dark chocolate on the outside (get it?!). They were surprisingly easy to make and one of the first treats to get gobbled up.
Continue reading Black Swan, White Swan…
Early Bird gets the Worm… and the cookie.
The more and more we cook and bake, the more we are able to experiment. Yes, its scary and sometimes not the result doesn’t taste good at all but sometimes you create something new and incredibly delicious.
We bake a lot of cookies in this house and we’re purists when it comes to our chocolate chip cookies (NO NUTS!). So we started to experiment with a couple of other cookies and we came up with something that included peanut butter, granola, raisins, and coconut milk. Its a variation on an oatmeal raisin/peanut butter cookie and of course we used our very favorite granola, Early Bird’s Choc-o-Doodle.
Continue reading Early Bird gets the Worm… and the cookie….
The Keeper
Making food for a group of people is challenging and a but intimidating, not only do you have to have enough food to go around at about the same time but its gotta be tasty. There’s people to impress! So when we decided to throw our honorary NumNum member, Joel, a birthday brunch we had to cook up our “go-to” dish, Peanut Butter Crunch French Toast. Its basically a peanut butter sandwich dressed up as french toast with a little crunch from cornflakes.
In addition to the french toast we added some baked eggs (recipe to come at another time) and hash browns from purple potatoes! You can’t have a birthday brunch, or any brunch, without mimosas so don’t forget about those!
A Casual Gathering
We have something to share with you, something that we’ve both worked on and I (Caroline, speaking) am extremely proud of. I started doing a series of cookbooks, and just got done with Book One. The series is about gathering together for the sake of food, the first book being about casual gatherings. I asked several of my favorite chefs, bloggers, friends, artists to contribute a menu and illustrated the recipes. Cathy Erway, Tom Mylan, Megan Gordon, The Jewels of New York, and Garrett Morin are the first in the series. Continue reading A Casual Gathering…
Sup- sup- supper Club!
Here’s the awesome thing about Supper Club: no matter how fun and tasty the last one was, the next one will be just as good. When we started out we weren’t sure that would be the case, but we’d have to say that our third dinner in October proved it to be true. Just take a look at these smiling faces! Then click through for a peek at the menu we served and the good times we had. And if you’re so inclined, go ahead and sign up for our mailing list, ’cause guess what? Winter Supper Club is totally happening, and soon.
