brunch for the girls

I can't believe I haven't blogged about this, one of my finest culinary moments of the year to date. Of course, I can hardly claim all the credit, as this was totally a joint effort. Back around Valentine's Day, Laura and hosted a brunch for a bunch of our girlfriends with a bunch of pink, sweet, girly food. In honor of Ms Leslie Knope, who provided the inspiration, I called it Galentine's Day. Don't you just love a cheesy portmanteau?



Now isn't that a picture perfect table? Do you like how I stuffed vases with tissue paper that I've saved rather than buying myself roses? You do? Yeah I thought it was pretty clever too.

And what do you see on that festive little table? A plethora of delicious treats! You can see that I made some chocolate covered strawberries, the Glazer girls brought those festively attired ginger muffins with the heart toothpicks, and Hannah brought a crazy good pound cake seen on the left. I think it had honey in it. The plate in the back is of cookies that DiDomenico brought, and the little green and white bag was full of coconut macaroons from Effie. Laura and I always have such generous guests.



This dish was our main course, a hearty savory breakfast dish to balance out all the sugar and sweetness to come. Eggs baked with onions, bacon, eggs, goat cheese and shredded beets, this was intentionally similar to the baked egg casserole I made for our marathon brunch. I made it with beets instead of squash partially because we always get beets from the food co-op, and they are always the last thing that we end up cooking, but also partially because I thought the pink beets would be appropriately festive.



Aside from the eggs, Laura came up with and prepared most of our menu when she found a great article about hosting a tea in the New York Times. The author's suggestion was to have a nice refined tea party in lieu of partaking in the Super Bowl festivities. Now, I'm all for tea parties and girly things, (although I actually quite dislike tea, the accoutrements are great), but I love me some organized sports as well, so we watched the game and hosted brunch/tea the next weekend.



Laura made these delightful tea sandwiches with an herb caper lemon butter, cucumber and radishes. So elegant.



We teamed up to make whole wheat crumpets with blood orange and meyer lemon marmalade and clotted cream. I bough special heart shaped cookie cutters because I am super adorable.



The "clotted cream" was a delicious and super easy mix of mascarpone and heavy cream, whipped together. Very rich, and very tasty, as were the crumpets, but the sweet and tangy marmalade was easily the best part, in large part because it's one of those things where you're just like "Wow, I can make that myself?!"



Finishing out the meal were these champagne floats with homemade strawberry ice cream. And then we watched Sleepless in Seattle. Does it get any more delightfully girly than that?

cucumber and roasted red pepper soup

cucumber soup with roasted red peppers

I will tell you up front that I didn't like this as much as my other cucumber soup. It wasn't bad, but the flavors just didn't meld together as well as the previous soup. This probably had something to do with the fact that the other soup was a tried and true flavor combination, and this soup was just me throwing whatever food co-op veggies I had left in the fridge in the blender and hoping for the best. Sometimes improvisation can be a recipe for success, but in this case it was a rather forgettable endeavor.

Basically, I roasted, peeled and seeded a sweet red pepper, and blended it up with a cucumber, a couple of scallions, peeled seeded tomatoes, a slice of jalapeno, sour cream, plain yogurt, dried cumin and garlic powder. It was fine, but a little strange. I probably should have added a lemon or something, because it was a little dull, aside from the hint of heat from the jalapeno.

Though this was ultimately a forgettable meal, I do want to show you something I am currently so, so happy not to be doing: straining my foods for bits of skins and seeds too large to enter a wired shut jaw.


a laborious task

For four long weeks, this time consuming task went hand and hand with eating. Scraping a spoon back and forth for what seemed like an eternity, coaxing little clumps of pulp and fruit flesh to pass through the fine mesh strainer so I could finally eat. It was by far the most frustrating part of the whole experience and delayed my meals considerably. It's no wonder I didn't have the patience to go back and add lemon juice after such an ordeal!

Right now, I am still on a soft food diet and cannot chew, but straining is thankfully a thing of the past. Hopefully, the coming week will see further improvement and allow me to eat more substantial foodstuffs. Fingers crossed!

central park picnic

Look how awesome my summer was before I broke my stupid mouth:



That's me eating a delicious Viennese cucumber salad in central park before taking a free canoe ride on the Harlem Meer.



That's the salad before I packed it up to bring to the park. It was easy and light and summery. I tried to score the cucumbers with the tines of a fork, but it didn't come out quick as neat and pretty as I had hoped. The taste, however, came through in full force.



I sliced the two cucumbers as thinly as possible, and then tossed them in a colander with a tablespoon of salt. I drained that in the sink for an hour, and then rinsed with cold water and squeezed out the excess. I mixed ⅓ cup white-wine vinegar, 1/4 cup water, 2 teaspoons sugar, and a teaspoon of dillweed and heated it on the stove until the sugar dissolved. There was also supposed to be a crushed clove of garlic, but I forget to add it, (*GASP!*), and I actually didn't even miss it. I quickly cooled the liquid in the freezer, and then poured it over the cucumber, and let that pickle overnight. It was tangy and delicious, and not too vinegary. It was a nice thing to eat outdoors on a summer's day.



And look at me eating it! What a mouthful! It's kind of weird how I happened to take all these extremely "LOOK AT ME, I'M EATING WITH MY MOUTH OPEN" photos immediately before breaking my jaw. I miss that freedom. I miss that food. And that's not all there was either.



There was pesto, because that's what I make whenever I have basil, and it's always delicious.



And my handsome boyfriend, eating a corn salad with tomato, cilantro and black beans, all from the food co-op and the Mount Morris Park farmer's market. The two ears of perfectly sweet and crunchy corn were raw, the cup of beans was simmered for a couple of hours and it was all tossed with half a large tomato, a small handful of chopped cilantro, and some salt and pepper. It was tasty, but even better when I grabbed half a lime and added the juice the next day. Gotta love that acid.



I loved it all, but Nathan wasn't crazy about the spread I put together. He felt our lunch was a bit too light and not filling enough. He also apparently doesn't like corn off the cob. First, boy is crazy, and second, I'd give just about anything to be able to eat a lunch like this right now. This is the last entry I have of my life before my jaw is broken, aside from some much earlier stuff that Nathan was supposed to blog about but probably won't. I'm not sure what shape the blog will be taking from here on out... Stay tuned to find out what a food blogger does when she breaks her jaw...

chilled cucumber soup

chilled cucumber soup

After my huge pot of borscht, I am a big fan of the cold soup. It is cool and refreshing and filling; the perfect thing for the oppressive heat wave that has kept wrapped New York in its hot little hands for all of this month.

This cucumber soup came about after one of our recent CSA shares included three cucumbers of tremendous proportions. I'm generally not crazy about cucumbers, but I liked the idea of turning them into a light, chilled, creamy soup.

I very loosely adapted my soup from this Emeril Lagasse recipe. I had my three gigandor cukes, a large fresh food co-op onion, a scallion, and a sizable handful each of parsley and cilantro. I chopped that stuff coarsely, and then threw it in the blender. I was worried about pureeing all that food, but I needn't have been. This was really easy to make because Laura's parents bought her an incredibly kick ass blender for Christmas. It pureed everything to perfection. I barely had to chop anything at all; it was great.


cucumber soup with a sprig of parsley

Then I scooped in about half a container of sour cream and probably an equal amount of plain yogurt. For spice I added a fair amount of salt and pepper, some of my cucumber dill mix, dried chili powder, cumin, garlic powder and I think oregano. For acidity, I put in the juice of half a lemon, although I'm sure lime would be awesome too. I blended again to combine, and then ate it right away. All the ingredients save the spices were straight from the fridge, so it was reasonably cold to start with. It was more chilled after a night in the fridge, and the flavors stronger and brighter, but it was good immediately after its tumultuous journey through the blender, served with a juicy steak and white rice.


a cool and refreshing summer meal

Speaking of cucumbers, I'm finding they have a fairly short shelf life. In general, I haven't had to toss much of my food co-op veggies out. I mean, sure, when I'm eating salad or greens in the later part of the week, some of them will be a little bruised or wilted, but only the worst of them get tossed in the trash. So far, I've wasted very little of my produce, but cucumbers have been the exception. I've had a couple of them turn to absolute mush in a plastic bag in the fridge. Any storage tips? Or exciting recipes that I will want to make immediately, thus avoiding the problem altogether?