Archive for the ‘Food’ Category
Monday, June 16th, 2008We’ve been short on day-to-day updates recently. Here are some pictures taken in the last couple of months, with some of the things we’ve been up to.
Ruth took a bread class, and has been baking a ton of delicious bread:
We’ve had lovely warm-but-not-hot weather … well, pretty much since we got here. But the last few weeks have been great grilling weather:
(That’s before. During picture here. The food didn’t last long enough after for a picture.)
Ruth advanced to candidacy a couple of weeks ago. Afterward, we went to Santa Barbara for a relaxing weekend away. We didn’t get many pictures, except for while we toured the botanical gardens there. These are particularly cool gardens, because they’ve made an effort to showcase the types of plants that occur naturally in central and southern California. Because Irvine is both very dry and very aggressively landscaped, it was easy for us to live here for almost two years and have very little exposure to native wildlife. Outside of trips to comparatively barren places like Anza-Borrego and Chino Hills, we haven’t seen very much native plantlife. So, it was really cool to see the redwoods, cacti, orchids, and so on.
Ruth and I have been making a yule log or two every December for three years now, and this year we made by far the best yet. I just want to get down links to the recipes we used, along with a few thoughts.
For this yule log, I used:
- This jelly roll cake
- This whipped cream recipe
- The buttercream recipe on page 348 of this book
- These assembly directions
I probably won’t use the same buttercream recipe again. It came out kind of weird — sort of dry and brittle. It still tasted great, and the texture actually resembled the bark on a log in a nice way, but it was a real pain to spread and it had a tendency to fall off of slices of the cake in chunks. Fortunately, I got a copy of The Professional Chef for Christmas, and it’s got very detailed directions for making a better buttercream.
Also, I’ve done several different things with the filling of different yule logs, but this whipped cream is everyone’s favorite. The fact that it’s so fluffy makes the log look great, and makes rolling it less stressful. It also tastes delicious.
Our few pictures of Thanksgiving are online. We started the day lying around, as here with Ruth’s monster of a cat. Eventually we got around to cooking, and made praline pumpkin pie (recipe), pumpkin crumble (recipe; Ruth makes her own pumpkin butter, rather than using a jar), fried okra (recipe), and buttermilk biscuits (recipe).
Then we went to our friend Kristina’s apartment, and had dinner with a ton of cool folks. Kenny made a great turkey (seen above), and there was pomegranate sangria, and and a delicious time was had by all.
Delicious turkey cookies!
Mmm… debris.
Over our first six months in Irvine, Ruth and I developed a pretty detailed list of things we disliked about the place: too many strip malls, not enough independently-owned anything, no used book stores, a seeming dearth of cultural activity. Also high on the list was absence of coffee shops other than Starbucks and its clones.
We’re still bummed about the used books thing, but a little research has turned up two good independent coffee shops. Our favorite is Kean, which is run by Martin Diedrich.
Diedrich has coffee in his blood, as his family has been growing coffee for at least four generations. According to the bags in which they sell the coffee, he chooses the beans and manages the roasting himself. This is easy to believe, as he is often found in the store during the afternoon. He is clearly very hands-on.
Another great thing about their beans is that they’re virtually all single-estate, and in many cases the name of the grower is right on the bag. That kind of transparency and attention to detail is such an outstanding contrast with the kind of bulk processing that produces the coffee at places like Starbucks and DunkinDonuts that it’s almost disorienting.
The drinks in the store are expertly made, and it’s impossible to make a bad cup at home with the beans they sell.