Happy 4th of July, Slashfood readers! In honor of today's holiday, I bring you a patriotic dessert from blogger/photographer Lelonopo for you to really feast your eyes on. She's created a blueberry and raspberry treat that isn't as aggressively red, white and blue as that famous flag cake, but is still appealingly thematic for the day.
I hope that everyone has a wonderful day today, filled with delicious food, awe-inspiring fireworks and safe, happy times. We look forward to seeing pictures of all the tasty things you created today, so make sure to take photos and upload them to the Slashfood Flickr pool!
Tonight, Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross are getting married. If that last sentence made you sit up a little straighter and blink with confusion at your computer screen, you're not the only one. You see, the actors who play Ben and Betsy all around Philadelphia are actually the ones getting married and it has become something of a public relations spectacle here in the City of Brotherly Love. So much so that their wedding has become a public event, at which the mayor is officiating and for which a gorgeous, 4th of July-themed cake has been baked.
The cake, conceived and baked by local sugar/flour/butter artist Zoe Lukas, is what interests us most around the Slashfood office. Lukas has created a three-tiered confection that is perfectly draped in white fondant and decorated with ribbon and handmade paper fireworks (what else could one want for a 4th of July wedding). There's an interview up on uwishunu, a local Philly blog, in which Lukas delves into the creation of the cake and how she designed its unique, yet traditional look. Check out the Whipped BakeshopFlickr page for the rest of the cake pictures.
The 4th of July weekend is a time designed perfectly for picnics and cookouts. There's really no better way to celebrate the nation's independence than by firing up the grill and cooking up some burgers, dogs, chicken drumsticks or ribs. I personally don't have big plans to do much in the way of grilling (not having any outdoor space will do that to a person), I have been invited to a couple of picnics and will be throwing together a red potato salad with an olive oil and vinegar dressing, and a creamy coleslaw with purple and green cabbage.
I want to know what the rest of you are cooking this weekend. What's going on your grill, in your picnic baskets or out on the buffet? How do you handle vegetarian and gluten-intolerant guests? And most importantly, how are you ending the meal?
For years now, I've been hearing about the Fancy Food Show. I'd see clips of it on the Food Network, or read about it in the New York Times, until this week, it had never been something I got to experience personally. And now that I've lived through my first one, I'm struggling to find a way to write about it.
You see, it's a big event. Thousands of people are there, selling, buying, tasting and sipping. I only sampled a fraction of the available goods and by the end of each day all I wanted was a crunchy green salad to serve as a simple foil to all the chocolate, cheese, cookies, crackers, salsas, jams and gourmet popcorn I had munched.
I discovered that herbal flavors are the New! Big! Thing! in sweets, beverages and vinaigrettes, so expect to see lots rosemary, lavender and mint in both sweet and savory items going forward. Another popular flavor combination I encountered was Pear-Ginger. It is a lovely marriage and I'm looking forward to seeing more of it on the store shelves. My gluten-free friends will be happy to hear that lots of companies are working on producing the best in gluten-free cookies, crackers and breads (I'll have more specifics in another post). And lastly, everyone is looking for a way to make their products more natural, organic and artisanal.
I'll have more on the show soon, including specific products that I loved. I'm still working my way through a lot of the samples I brought home with me (the image above is my coffee table after I unpacked my suitcase). Don't forget to check out Kat's Day One Favorites!
I first heard of agave nectar five years ago, when a friend of mine went off of wheat and sugar simultaneously. She struggled with the lack of wheat in her diet but thanks to agave nectar, didn't have much trouble staying away from sugar and sweets. She became something of an agave booster and talked it up to anyone who would listen. I became a slow adopter, and began to use agave nectar to sweeten my tea and morning bowls of oatmeal.
I've always wanted to to explore baking with agave nectar, but until now, I'd never had the correct resource (and I worried that trying to use it with one of my sugar-based recipes would be inviting disaster). Enter Ania Catalano's book, Baking with Agave Nectar. This squat paperback is beautifully photographed and contains 100 recipes that all use agave as their primary sweetener. Catalano became interested in agave nectar when she was diagnosed with hypoglycemia and needed to find a sugar substitute that tasted good and wouldn't spike her blood sugar levels the way that processed sugar, honey and maple syrup did.
One of the things I appreciate about this book is that Catalano doesn't just replace sugar with agave nectar. She is careful to incorporate whole wheat and sprouted flours into her recipes, so that when you bake her treats, you know that you are making something that will be far healthier than what you can pick up at your local bakery. In these times, when we're all looking for ways to improve the quality of the foods that we eat, this volume is a wonderful assistant in allowing you to have tasty, sweet baked goods that are good for you as well.
We are just hours away from a national holiday, and nothing ushers in a summer celebration better than a cool, fruit-based drink. This sparkling beverage, with bits of watermelon floating throughout and a matching straw, begs to be imitated for your Independence Day festivities (there's no recipe on the photo page, but watermelon would go nicely with any number of fizzy drinks).
Have you ever gazed out at your backyard and wished you had the time to install and tend an organic vegetable garden (but your busy life prevents you from making the initial investment of energy)? If you're in the Bay Area, you can now outsource your vegetable gardening needs. A new business has started recently, called MyFarm, which will come out to your house, scope out your available space and amount of sun and create a personalized vegetable garden to suite your needs.
The initial installation runs between $600 - $1,000 and then you pay a weekly service charge for maintenance (depending on the size of your yard). They'll also leave a basket of freshly harvested veggies on your doorstep for you (that will often include produce from other, abundantly producing backyards). For those folks who don't know where to begin in creating their own organic vegetable garden, I can see how this could be a valuable service, especially in these days when it's important to know just where your veggies are coming from (they'll even manage your compost pile for you).
I've always enjoyed the energy and care that people put into packing bento box lunches. I love checking out the stuff that Biggie creates on Lunch in a Box and Jennifer McCann's Vegan Lunch Box was once one of my daily blog stops (she doesn't update as regularly as she used to). Today's bento image comes to us from Kate, a regular commenter and photo uploader around these parts. She's packed up a delicious and abundant lunch that has me wishing she'd come to my house and pack me a mid-day meal.
This picture isn't quite as delectable as some of the other images I regularly post in this space. However, it's such a great idea that when I saw it, I thought to myself, "That's just the sort of thing I have to share with the world of Slashfood readers."
From Biggie of Lunch in a Box, her image shows how she uses plastic water bottles to store frozen veggies like corn, peas and chopped onions. It makes it really easy to pour out a small amount, which is perfect for those times when you are pulling together meals for one. This not only works well for the prepacked frozen veggies that you buy, also for the veggies you freeze yourself. I imagine that the wider mouth bottles would work really well for frozen berries (great for when you make smoothies).
This month, the Daring Bakers challenge (they are a group of bakers and food bloggers who all work the same recipe once a month, in order to expand their skills and try something new) was to work with a Danish Braid. Over the weekend, the internet was flooded with delicious pastry, crafted by experienced and new bakers alike.
When I was a kid, we had a set of popsicle molds that I loved. They produced round popsicles and the handle part had little circus animals on them. My sister and I would always fight over who got the elephant or the lion. In later years we got one of those sets with the build-in straw, that allowed you to slurp up the melting juice so that it didn't spill out all over your hands. In those days, there was just nothing better than a homemade popsicle made from orange or applejuice.
With summer undeniably here, what better time pull out those molds and make some of your own homemade frozen treats.
I am not much of a drinker. There was a time, about four years ago, when I could hold my own at a bar, but these days, a single beer or glass of wine makes me tipsy and if I go for a second, I am instantly ready for bed. However, for someone who hardly drinks, I have a fairly extensive collection of wine, beer and hard alcohol in my apartment. The bulk of the booze is leftover from my grandparents, who always kept a well-stocked bar so that they'd be able to serve guests their choice of pre- and post-dinner cocktails. The beer is from Scott's birthday party back in February (we need to have another party, in order to use up this stash) and the wine is almost entirely from potlucks and dinner parties I've hosted over the years.
The bottles of wine (which I now keep stacked three high under a built-in cabinet in my living room) have become my go-to source for hostess and party gifts. Occasionally I feel a little embarrassed about this re-gifting habit (and then I start to wonder through how many hands that particular bottle has passed) but I've discovered a new product that will allow me to inject a little humor into the wine bottle hand off. It is the letterpress tags you see above that were created by two women who were challenged by the task of finding good cards to go with bottles of wine. I'm a particular fan of the one that says, "Regifted With Love."
I stopped into my favorite local produce stand after work on Wednesday, to pick up some salad makings (for once, I had used up everything from my CSA share) and a pound of fingerling potatoes for roasting (I've been experiencing something of a roasted potato yen). While I was there, I saw a cluster of woman standing around a display, cooing and exclaiming. Eventually they dissipated, and I was able to see what all the fuss was about. It was a box of tomatoes.
However, these weren't just any tomatoes. These were the very first New Jersey tomatoes of the season. I approached the box with a sense of reverence and briefly considered genuflecting, before determining that the story was a little too crowded for rapturous displays of produce-inspired passion. I reached out and picked up one. It was heavy for its size and felt good in my hand.
I took it home and as soon as was finished photographing it (I knew it was worthy of a blog post), I cut in. The interior was a deep red (none of that pale pink you find in conventional February tomatoes). I ate the first thick slice atop a piece of gently toasted pain au levain, before devoring the rest of the tomato with nothing more than a sprinkling of salt. I officially declare Jersey tomato season open!
I look at the no-knead bread recipe, created by Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery and printed by the New York Times in the fall of 2006, as one of those recipes that will be with us for all time to come. People went crazy for it when it first came out and folks all over the world continue play with it, innovating new ways to make beautiful, flavorful, bakery-quality bread in their very own ovens. In January, Cook's Illustrated devoted an entire issue to no-knead bread, doing their level best to make an already-good recipe even better.
Today's image, from Timothy Gerdes, is a loaf of nearly no-knead bread with olives, rosemary and parmesan made from the Cook's Illustrated version of the recipe. Looks delicious Timothy, thanks for adding it to the Slashfood Flickr pool.
The first year I was in grad school, my roommate was an Indian doctor. He was in the last year of his residency and was looking for an inexpensive place to live. He wound up renting my second bedroom and in the year we shared the apartment, he tried to teach me how to cook Indian food. Sadly, most of the teachings he tried to impart unto me went un-retained and these days I typically turn to the Indian restaurant that is located just steps from my building when I have a curry craving.
However, I recently acquired a cookbook that I'm hoping will remind me of Madhu's cooking lessons and ween me off my weekly orders of Chicken Tikka Masala. 600 Curries is an 800 page volume that hopes to make a variety of Indian dishes more accessible to the average Western cook. I must admit that I sometimes end up feeling a little intimidated by cookbooks with this many recipes, as I feel like I don't know where to start. This one feelings surprisingly accessible, despite the volume of recipes it contains. I think it has to do in large part with the careful and detailed instructions that are broken down to be easy to follow.
When I first picked up this book, I was concerned that it would be filled unappealing, Americanized recipes. This is because I know that curry as we know it isn't indigenous to India. However, as I worked my way through the book, I realized that the author, Raghavan Iyer, is using the word curry as an all-encompassing term that can embrace a whole spectrum of Indian and Indian-influenced foods. So it actually contains a wealth of recipes that can really spice up your weekly meals. This is one I'd recommend to cooks who want a single ethnic cookbook that will have the ability to inspire new dishes for years to come.
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