Double Double, Toil and Trouble...

by EP & X

Last weekend, we did something we've wanted to do for a LONG time.  No, not rent a Tuscan villa for the summer (fingers crossed though!).  No, we hosted a Haunted Halloween Dinner Party!  We've been wanting to do a seated dinner for a long time, Halloween-themed or otherwise, but we always struggled with the guest list limitations associated with dinner parties.  You see, we're quite popular, and have trouble only selecting 10 or so guests to join us. (Okay, we're really not that popular, but surely between the 2 of us there are more than 10 people we want to feed and pelt with cocktails- and even squeezing 10 people into Xani's dining room was a challenge.) We figured if it went well (and it did!), we could invite a different group the next time, so we wouldn't feel so guilty. Love that Jewish guilt!

As with all of our parties, we love a theme. This year, we were inspired by a Martha Stewart recipe called Cauldron Curry, that referenced the famous "double double, toil and trouble" witches of Macbeth. We decided we would throw a Witch's Dinner! Here's the witchy recap:

Notes on Food (and Drink): Paris Edition

by EP

**NOTE: I found this never-before-seen Paris post that I abandoned mid-way through, and figured it was still good stuff, so I finished it and am posting it now.  A little "Springtime in Paris" in August, for your reading pleasure.  Enjoy!**

While I was eating my way through Paris, I learned a few things and made a few observations, and tried unsuccessfully to blend and not be a typical "stupid American."  I won't say we successfully blended at all, but we did find that making the effort to speak French (at least a little!) went a long way with most people.  Rachel speaks French (with an African accent, admittedly) and was able to communicate on our behalf throughout the trip - and I can't thank her enough!  (Amusing side note: since I don't speak French, I didn't say much to people unless I knew they spoke some English -- I didn't want to just assume they could or would speak to me in English.  This resulted in a few instances of people saying, to Rachel, "Your friend is quiet - is she shy?"  HA.  If they only knew.)

One of my favorite pictures we took

Birthday Weekend at Blackacre

by EP

This is going to be one of those old-school, family Sunday dinner posts that our long-time readers remember from back in the day, when the BCD parents lived closer to Baltimore, in sunny Columbia, MD.  Technically this meal was on a Saturday -- a requirement when your parents live a 2-hour drive in beach traffic away. We gathered at Blackacre to celebrate something super-important: my birthday!!  My actual birthday was at the end of July but this weekend was the first time the 5 of us could get together to celebrate at home.  Readers might remember that for birthdays in the BCD family, the birthday girl/boy gets to pick his or her favorite menu (we all know Dad's favorite meal: lobsters), and the whole family works together create a fabulous birthday meal.

"Master" Recipes

by Xani

The other day I embraced an empty house, some free time, and an abundance of summer produce.  I cooked, cooked, and cooked some more, and loved every minute of it.  Later, while reflecting on all I made that day, I realized that all my creations were essentially building blocks, which could be combined with each other and other staples to create hundreds, maybe thousands of dishes.  For me, this was something of a revelation, and I'm not sure why I didn't think of it before.  When you prepare one ingredient or element for a particular recipe, be it a sauce, filling, cooked starch, whatever, there is no rule that says that all of that element must be used for just that recipe!  Why not make double the "element" and use the rest for some entirely different preparation?  Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?  Wait, maybe it doesn't.  Let me show by example:

And Now for Something Completely Different

by Xani

Long-time readers of this blog might have picked up on a theme-- EP and I are all about TASTE.  Sure, we "eat with our eyes" first, and food can be elevated by gorgeous presentation, but in the end, if it don't taste good, I ain't eating it.  I'd rather have a piece of delicious homemade pie, even if it is lopsided and falling-apart, than a picture-perfect pie from the bakery that just tastes blah.  So that's pretty much my rule with food: flavor over form.  But, there are exceptions to every rule, and these cupcakes broke all the rules!

Home-Cookin'

by Xani

From July 1-July 28 2011, I conducted a little experiment.  I challenged myself not to eat any meals or snacks that I didn't cook myself.  No meals out. No prepared foods.  No grabbing a snack from the vending machine.  No purchasing food or beverages except in "ingredient form" from the grocery store or farmers market, unless absolutely necessary (more on that below).  This whole plan was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to seeing the credit card bill after I got back my my late-June trip to California, but I also thought it would be interesting to see if I could stick to the rules I created for myself  (right up until we went to NYC for the last weekend in July, where we ate EVERY meal/snack out!).

During the experiment, I home-cooked every meal, snack, and beverage (including soda), EXCEPT:
-Three mandatory work lunches where bringing my own food was not an option,
-One lunch out when I was "on the road" all day running errands,
-One delicious (and comped) press dinner at Chazz,
-One birthday lunch for EP, paid for by our lovely Mother,
-One Dunkin' Donuts coffee, purchased for my by my boyfriend (believe me, it was absolutely necessary), and
-One dinner of boyfriend's leftover buffalo wings, which I had to eat in bed since the entire first floor of our house was under construction (also absolutely necessary, as cooking was not an option).

And that's it!  When you consider I generally eat three meals a day plus a snack or two, that means I cooked/prepared about 100 meals/snacks, and only "cheated" the above 8 times.  Not bad!

Turns out, when you can't go out for any meals, your other option is cooking.  A lot.  But that was fine with me.  I ended up making some really yummy food this past month.  The local produce is great this time of year and I found myself going to markets Saturdays, Sundays and Tuesdays some weeks.  But the fresh ingredients really make a difference.  Here are some of the highlights from this month:

Peach & Goat Cheese Gazpacho: Barely adapted from this F&W recipe.  This was a MAJOR hit and I will definitely be making it again before summer (and peaches) is gone.  A little sweet, a little tangy, cool and creamy.  Yum.

Greek Zucchini Fritters with Feta:  Another great use of summer produce.  The texture reminded me of a crabcake, but the flavor was nice and fresh with the feta and dill.  Served with a little homemade tzatiki on the side.

Ratatouille: a summer classic.  Ate this for SEVERAL meals.

Phyllo pizza: Another big hit.  We liked it so much we made it again a few nights later (with the remaining phyllo dough) with some different toppings.  But summer tomatoes and fresh basil are a classic combo, of course.

Quinoa salad:  Made this in a few different iterations throughout the month.  Cooked, cooled quinoa (super-easy in the rice cooker), random veggies, herbs and legumes (looks like this one has edamame, radishes, red bell pepper, black beans, tomatoes, parsley) and dressing.  Sometimes I like to "match" the dressing to the ingredients (chipotle and lime in the dressing, with black beans, cilantro and avocado in the salad, etc) but most of the time I just used my standard vinaigrette, flavored with lemon juice. Tastes even better if you let it sit overnight.

PIES!!  So, this is a little off-point but I was super-excited to get the opportunity to make the pies for my dear friend Kim's birthday BBQ (actually, a grilled-pizza and bloody mary brunch, but when the grill is fired up and cornhole is being played, it's officially a BBQ).  I got some great tips from my blogger friend Sarah and ended up making a peach-blueberry pie with pecan crumble topping, as well as a sour-cherry with almond lattice crust.  They were SO.  GOOD.  I got all the produce from the farmers market and the flavors were just incredible.  Not to mention my tender, delicious crust that never fails me.

So, using mint.com (great program for tracking spending, BTW) I can see that, even with my increased grocery/farmers market costs, I still spent over $200 less on food and alcohol than I would in a normal month-- not bad!

Overall I'm happy with my experiment, and I think I've learned a few lessons about how to make dinner happen when I don't feel like looking-- going out is not the only option!

What did you cook in July?

X

Celebrity Karma Strikes Again

by EP

Xani and I haven't had the best of luck in our quest to meet celebrities.  Sure, we've hung out with Michael Midgley of Top Chef fame, and we saw Dennis Quaid at In N Out Burger in LA.  We also spied a handful of celebs when we were in NYC for Xani's birthday in February (ahem, Sandra Oh and Michael Imperioli -- not together), but for the most part, we repel celebrities, instead of attracting them.  Don't they know we're up and coming celebs ourselves?!

We thought, when we went to try Chazz: A Bronx Original, a new Italian-American restaurant in Harbor East, that our luck just might be turning around -- after all, one of the owners is Oscar-nominated Chazz Palminteri!

We arrived in the welcoming space on Aliceanna St., and unfortunately, our bad luck had struck again.  No Chazz (except in photos and movies playing on screens around the restaurant).  But, in place of producing a famous person, the friendly staff at Chazz provided us with a fantastic evening.

When is a Recipe YOURS?

by Xani

As some of you may know, EP and I are lawyers.  So are our parents, and so is Dave, my boyfriend.  I mention this as background/explanation for why, on Sunday night, after many, many cocktails, and many, many pounds of lobster, the five of us were discussing not family memories, not the fate of the O's season, but copyright infringement and the intricacies of changing, using, re-printing, and selling a recipe.

This is normal for us.  In fact, Dad recently purchased this little torture device so that, when we run out of our own hypothetical questions, we now have literally thousands of legal quandaries at our fingertips.  Joy.  But this past Sunday we were discussing a real-world scenario involving pie.

You see, we had just finished an amazing, belated Father's Day dinner.  We drank champagne, slurped uni shooters (not for the faint of heart, as they included uni, ponzu, tobiko, sake, hot sauce, and a raw quail egg yolk), ate the season's first green tomatoes, pan-fried with remoulade sauce, then tucked into 12.5 pounds of lobster and my best-ever batch of onion rings.  And then, it was time for pie.