HappyTummy              

I’m back! And what a week to join in on the fun!

I loved this bread. I think chocolate and bananas are such a winning combination. Usually, I have ripe bananas waiting for me in the freezer, but I must have used all of them because I couldn’t find any. So I purposefully bought a bunch of bananas a week ahead of time to give them plenty of time to grow those big black spots. And sure enough, when the weekend rolled around, those babies were ripe!

I love that this bread was made with cocoa. I think there is such a difference between straight-up chocolate flavor and cocoa flavor. The former can be really sweet—even the darkest of varieties. The latter has a very smoky, earthy, almost woody taste. That may sound gross, but really, it’s delicious. And paired with the banana, it was heavenly.

Of course, I made a few changes. I figured since the bread was saturated with heavy flavors, a little whole wheat flour would go unnoticed. I also baked the bread in four mini-loaf tins. Much better to freeze and save that way, since I knew we wouldn’t be able to eat an entire big loaf between the two of us. Yum yum. The final product was a delicious. And I still have a mini-loaf wrapped up tightly in the freezer for another day!

Thanks to Steph for this week’s selection. You can find Dorie’s original recipe at Steph’s blog, Obsessed with Baking. My adapted version is below!

[Get the recipe →]

Happy New Year!

Wow…it has been way too long since I last posted. Why have I been away for so long?

Well, for about nine weeks straight, I had absolutely NO desire to step into the kitchen. I also had an incredible aversion to sweets of any kind. Can you believe it? Me? An aversion to sweets? Crazy, I know, but it’s true!

Have you guessed why I’ve been away? I’m pregnant! There is a bun in the oven! I’m so happy that I can finally let the cat out of the bag!

I’m now almost four months pregnant. While my first trimester was horrible—24/7 nausea, food aversions, heartburn, extreme fatigue—I’m now feeling so much better! And I’m back in the kitchen!

But of course now, my spare time is spent thinking about the baby-to-be, so I’m not sure I’ll be posting to this blog nearly as much as I used to :) We’ll be finding out the sex at the end of the month, and we can’t wait. B and I are convinced it’s a boy… “Only a boy could wreak that much havoc on your body!” he jokes. But we would be happy with either a boy or a girl! No preference here!

In the meantime, try this recipe for white cupcakes! I frosted them with a delicious cream cheese frosting, originally meant for Red Velvet cupcakes, but equally as delicious with these. I brought these to work to announce my pregnancy—my coworkers decided they’d eat the cupcake with the frosting color corresponding to the sex they thought I’d be having. And wouldn’t you know it—the color that went the fastest by far was pink!

[Get the recipe →]

What a sad week it’s been for the food world. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read that Gourmet magazine was folding after 70 years! I so love that magazine, and am so sad to see it go. At least its sister publication, Bon Appetit, will still be around.

I know it’s already October, and this post is way too late. But this Brown Sugar Berry Cobbler was the last Gourmet recipe I made, and thought it would be a fitting tribute to the beloved cooking magazine… not to mention a sweet reminder of the height of summer, when plump, juicy berries of all kinds were bountiful.

My sister and I made this when she came to visit one weekend. We’d never made a cobbler before, and were pleasantly pleased with this recipe. Flaky, buttery biscuits swimming in a slightly sweet, slightly tart pool of berries—this was a delicious dessert.

Actually… we ate it for breakfast, forks straight into the baking dish… but that’s our little secret, hee hee!
 

[Get the recipe →]

Care for a giant chocolate chip cookie that’s flat and crispy on the edges, but soft, chewy and extremely chocolatey on the inside? I’d say go to Jacques Torres’ Chocolate shop in Brooklyn, but I won’t because, yay—you can make them yourself!

Until now, there were only two chocolate chip cookie recipes I’d ever made in my life. One is the recipe I’ve used pretty much since the day I could hold a wooden spoon—the Betty Crocker chocolate chip cookie recipe that my mom made us throughout our childhood. The other is the Cook’s Illustrated version that I only started making two years ago. Both are delicious in their own right—mom’s Betty Crocker recipe is cakey and somewhat puffy and the CI recipe is extremely chewy and buttery. I love both kinds of cookies, and I’ve never felt the need to try any others.

That is, until now. I didn’t jump on the Jacques Torres/New York Times cookie bandwagon when it was racing through food blogs everywhere last June. I just didn’t want to try the recipe until I had eaten the real deal first. And I got that opportunity on my last trip to New York City in August, when my sister and I tried it in ice cream sandwich form. It was love at first bite. So of course I bought a bag of his chocolate disks so that I could recreate the cookies at home.

These cookies are perfect in every way. They of course taste good, but they also look impressive too. For one thing, they’re the size of your hand when you spread all your fingers out. Then, the sea salt that you sprinkle on top give it that gourmet look. And finally, the cross section of the cookie looks like no chocolate chip cookie I’ve ever seen—as the disks melt while baking, they end up creating a series of chocolate layers. If you love chewy, buttery and chocolatey cookies, you must give this one a go!

[Get the recipe →]

I know… it seems like I did a lot of traveling this summer. Because of the nature of my job, I’m really only allowed to take my vacation days during the summer months (with exceptions here and there, for short three-day weekend trips and such), so I generally try to do the big vacations in the summer.

About a month after we returned from our Mediterranean cruise, I flew to the Big Apple to visit my sister. You may remember the last time I wrote about such a trip—it was basically a weekend of non-stop eating. It was pretty much the same this time.

This post actually starts about two-weeks before the trip to visit my sister, when I headed to NYC on business. It was there for only one night, and thankfully there was no business dinner. So my sister and I headed to Market Table in the West Village, where we started off with Marinated Heirloom Tomatoes with Basil Vinaigrette and some wine. Market Table focuses on Seasonal American food, and our dinner was simply delicious. We also had a fantastic server, which made our meal that much better. For the entree, she had the Grilled Pork Porterhouse with Summer Squash Succotash and Fried Onions and I had the Grilled Arctic Char with Red Flannel Hash, Bacon and Fennel Salad.

When I headed back to NYC two weeks later for a four-day vacation, my sister and I were ready to hit the ground running. We’re both huge morning coffee addicts, and as soon as we roll out of bed, we head out to a nearby grocer/deli, the Garden of Eden Gourmet. Besides the little coffee bar they have, they sell all kinds of produce, shelved goods, pastries and breads. I had to take a shot of this—don’t the breads look so tasty?

For lunch, we made our way to Cafe Habana, a hole-in-the-wall dive specializing in the best Cuban food ever. Actually, I’m not really even sure I could call it a “hole-in-the-wall” or a dive because it’s pretty darned popular and it’s always packed to the gills. Anyway, between the two of us, we shared the restaurant’s Grilled Corn Mexican Style (served with chili powder lime and cheese), Rice, Beans and Spinach Plate and a Cuban Sandwich. Can you see the roast pork, ham and swiss cheese in between the crispy, chewy toasted baguette?

Neither my sister nor I can leave a meal without having something sweet. We headed to Balthazaar Bakery, where we ordered a sliced Pecan Sticky Bun, and munched on it as we window shopped in SoHo. On a totally unrelated note, we are now officially addicted to Sabon, a fabulous soap shop where you can give your hands a mini-spa treatment—exfoliate them with delicious-smelling sugar scrubs, then slather them with thick, creamy lotions, all for free! (They’re of course hoping you’ll buy something you like.)

The great thing about visiting my sister in New York is that we walk everywhere. We rarely take cabs or the metro, so we feel that we’re burning off a lot of the calories that we consume. Which is good, because later that evening, we had plans to visit family in the Jersey suburbs for a BBQ. Of course when you’re with family, you’re always going to OD on good food!

I probably ate a little too much that day, because when I woke up the next morning, I wasn’t feeling too hot. My sister and I walked to Morandi, where we sat outside and she had a yummy-looking poached egg dish. I passed on brunch and instead got a big fat raspberry bran muffin at Birdbath Neighborhood Green Bakery, an eco-frienly, all-organic offshoot of the famed City Bakery.

Right around the corner from Birdbath, we stumbled upon the most precious little cookbook store—a tiny little nook of a place, filled from top to bottom with cookbooks of every kind. Bonnie Slotnik Cookbooks is just what you’d imagine an old-fashioned indepenent bookstore to be. Antique cookbooks from the 1800s, ethnic cookbooks from every corner of the world, etiquette books, housekeeping manuals, little novelty kitchen knick-knacks—things were just spilling from the shelves. But don’t let me give you the wrong picture—it was in no way messy. In fact, Bonnie herself was organizing everything meticulously the morning we walked in. She asked if we needed any help, and we said no, we were just browsing through her wonderful collection of used cookbooks. She was never pushy in any way, even though we stayed in her store thumbing through cookbooks for the better part of an hour. It was just the loveliest way to spend a Saturday morning.

And what about a great way to spend a Saturday evening? We were so excited for our reservations to the famous Momofuku Ssam Bar! Now if you haven’t heard of David Chang’s four-restaurant Momofuku empire… well, you should! He’s been hailed as one of the city’s most innovative chefs, perfecting the art of noodles and elevating pork to whole new level. And yes (as I’m sure you noticed with the Cuban sandwich I ate earlier), I pushed aside the worries meat would have on my sensitive tummy, and dived into deliciousness. If you ever get the chance to dine at Momofuku Ssam Bar, don’t miss the Spicy Pork Sausage and Rice Cakes (with chinese broccoli and crispy shallots). They have the crispiest outer shell, but the chewiest, tender insides. And they pack a kick! It was by far my favorite dish of the night. Others will say the Steamed Pork Buns (with pork belly, hoisin, cucumbers and scallions) are a must—I enjoyed them enough, but to be honest, they were a little too fatty for my tastes.

We also had the Snap Peas (with mint, egg and XO sauce), and the Hawthorne Valley Buttermilk (with fuji apple dashi, honey locust herbs and pine nuts). Both were so innovative and magically delicious. I’ve never had food like what we had at Momofuku, and I’m so glad we went.

Day three started out somewhat dreary, and we were worried it was going to rain. Instead, it was incredibly humid, which wasn’t the best condition for what we had in store. We decided to walk all the way down to the Brooklyn Bridge, walk all the way across it, and head to the Brooklyn Flea market, at its DUMBO location (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass for those of you who were wondering). We love rummaging around flea markets, antique stores, thrift shops and the like, and we had a blast digging through vintage clothing and jewelry. Our mom would have loved to have been there with us—she is the queen of finding great deals and then flipping them on eBay!

The flea market wasn’t our only stop though. Just a hop, skip and jump away is Jacques Torres Chocolate. If you love chocolate (are there people out there who don’t?), you must visit Jacques Torres. It’s a little pricey, but it’s so worth it. Chocolate covered corn flakes, cheerios, marshmallows and more; thick and creamy hot chocolate; and of course, the famous flat chocolate disks for the famous Chocolate Chip Cookies, which I’m sure will go down in history.

My sister and I dilly dallied in the shop, browsing the goodies and breathing in the delicious chocolate air. But we couldn’t leave without spliting a chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich. What makes these ice cream sandwiches so delicious is definitely the cookie—it’s flat and crispy on the edges, but chewy in the middle. And because the chips in the cookies are really disks, when they bake and melt, the disks create layers of chocolate instead of chunks. Can you see chocolate strata in the picture?

That ends my blog entry about the NYC trip of 2009. The next day we laid low, and had dinner at Cafe Mogador, a fantastic Moroccan restaurant in the East Village. We completely overdosed on hummus, baba ghanoush, falafel and a chicken tagine. It was the perfect ending to a perfect weekend!