after having swallowed too many bites of those awful carmel ice cream cakes, my sister and i began making our grandmother’s birthday cake every year. for the past four years or so, we’ve made variations on the same cake for her birthday, which falls on […]
it has been three years and still jessica won’t divulge the secret of her wonderful christmas cookies. every year i look forward to that little bundle of joy, which smells so happily of spices. in the past few years i’ve been able to exercise some […]
and also for the recipe junkies, here is how i made the chicken gravy which i liked so much. again, like i did for the chicken stew, i eyeballed the amounts of things in this recipe, since i used what was around to make it. it was more of an experiment than an actual stated desire to have gravy for the chicken. you don’t have to add pan drippings but it will make the gravy better. the nice part of the recipe is that you can make the gravy without ever disturbing the chickens as they roast – ie, you don’t have to wait for the chickens to be done before making the gravy. (more…)
i went to picco on saturday night with my parents, nora, and charles. picco is a pizza/pasta place on the first floor of the new apartment building at the east berkely side of tremont street – atelier 505, where nomar reportedly looked for an apartment […]
on tuesday i spent much of the cleanup picking semi-raw chicken off the roasted chickens. by the fourth chicken i was tired of picking it off, and probably didn’t pick it as cleanly as a hungrier person might have. i packed all of that chicken […]
i organized finals dinners this semester, which went pretty smoothly although i’m not sure if everyone enjoyed their cooking team. i hope they did. here’s what we had:
lundi / anna-miriam-v: chicken tarragon (chicken with a tarragon-cream sauce), tofu tarragon, spanikopita, and a pear tart. i really like miriam’s chicken tarragon, and also spanikopita. pears i’m not wild about since i’m slightly allergic to them, but the crust was this great almondy, buttery thing which i’m afraid i didn’t eat enough of. i have extremely fond memories of eating chicken tarragon and rice for lunch during the next few days.
mardi / luis-marissa-v: gorgonzola risotto with balsamic tomato relish, roasted chicken, potato salad, fruit salad. i fully admit that the potato salad was just a result of the menu needing a vegetable and my yen for potato salad. i may have been the only person to eat it. it really would have gone better with wednesday’s menu, but i decided to slightly abuse my power. anyway, we were intending to make a sponge cake a la jessica (who made carrie’s birthday cake – a sponge cake filled with tokay-marinated peaches and iced with whipped cream) but we didn’t know the recipe and i had been too far behind in errands to get it. instead, since we had leftover fruit from diner de noel (more specifically, we had intended to make a fruit salad but didn’t), we made a fruit salad and whipped cream. i’m not a huge fan of fruit salad (various slight allergies), so i had figgy pudding with whipped cream, which is really a fabulous combination. the gorgonzola risotto was actually better in the vegetarian version (veg stock instead of chicken stock), and i was really surprised by the favorable reception that the risotto got, given that it had the gorgonzola (a mild blue cheese) in it. (as an aside: is anybody else bothered by the phrase “bleu cheese”? we are in the US, and we speak english. “blue cheese” is the phrase, not the mangled franglais “bleu cheese.”) the chicken, well, roasted chickens always give me problems. i took the temperature and it was still 20 degrees off, but the juices all ran clear. i took it out anyway, but the chicken in a few cases was really underdone. on the bright side, the gravy was quite good and i made a stew out of the leftover chicken a few days later. (more…)