Just Checking In.....

My weekend was incredibly busy, what with the pre-freshies moving in to start their summer program, and me having to not only help them move, but move myself as well. I am now the proud (I say that rather dubiously) resident of a dorm room. Again. Oh well, I'll be back in the apartment in a few weeks, and hopefully (keep your fingers crossed for me) into a house with L for the school year.

So today, since I haven't had a chance to cook, and I really should be getting to sleep since I'm supposed to be up and perky for my TA job at 9 (gah, why would anyone schedule anything that early in the summer?), tonight I'm going to go with a quick link post, with some of my favorite food sites, and places where I get inspiration.

First off is the Holy Grail of food inspiration sites:
Food Gawker

The food is all user submitted and absolutely awesome. It does get overrun with Tuesdays with Dorie submissions, and goes a little crazy every month with the Daring Baker's Challenge, but it has amazing food, and great tips and tricks for anyone cooking with just about anything.
*Note- yes, I have been through every page of this website, and I have clicked on the majority of the links and favorite-d them on Stumble Upon. In a completely unrelated note, my main tag for interests on Stumble is Food, followed closely by Cooking and Photography.

Next, my personal favorite and one of my friends (in the Facebook sense of the word):
David Lebovitz

His tagline is "An American living in Paris", and he does it wonderfully. He's funny, smart, and a great cook. Actually, if he wasn't multiple years older than me and living in Paris with his boyfriend, I'd totally date him just for the cooking advice.


Something that I hope everyone has discovered:
Serious Eats

A blogging community, Serious Eats has been bringing foodies together for years now. I don't have a whole lot more to say except that it is AWESOME and you should check it out right now. If you like Star Wars/read Least I Could Do, this should work : Go now, you will.


Those are my three "check them everyday" sites, but I also read lots of others on a nearly wweekly basis, which I will eventually post in the links section.

Eventually.


In the mean time, by which I mean "while I'm stuck in the dorm with only a microwave and a steamer to cook with", you should go check these sites out. I mean it when I say that I love them.

Weekend in New York- Spending Sunday with Dean and Laura

On Sunday of my Epic New York Adventure, (yes, it should all be capitalized, it was just that epic) I went out to Brooklyn to meet up with some friends that have a home on the Island.
They are two of my favorite summer people, and it was really great to see them!


Now, we didn't go on any explorations for out of the way food joints, but we did pass a joyous lazy afternoon in Prospect Park. If anyone remembers, that weekend was the weekend of the New York heat wave, and it reached over 90° in Manhattan. Brooklyn was thankfully cooler, but it was just too darn hot to actually do anything.

So instead, we picnicked in the park, and had a wonderful and generally downbeat afternoon.

Our luscious spread...

Laura made a great pasta salad, with lots and lots of olives (my fave!), and we had tons of hummus and cheeses to go with our artisan loaf.



There was also the remains of a roast chicken in there somewhere, which Laura and Dean had cooked a couple of nights before using a brine recipe.

Brines are, in my opinion, one of the best ways to cook poultry. The bird gets a great dose of flavor, and stays moist throughout.

Dean and Laura's version? Absolutely splendid.

It really made me wish I lived in an apartment, so that I could go home and make one for myself.


Laura and Dean also introduced me to my new favorite soda, which is unfortunately hard to find, Grown Up Soda (GUS for short). Their Cranberry Lime flavor is absolutely wonderful, like all the best parts of lime seltzer and cranberry juice, only a million times better.

If you're interested, their soda also comes in Cola, Meyer Lemon, Star Ruby Grapefruit (I'll have to try this one), Valencia Orange, Pomegranate, Ginger Ale, and Crimson Grape.

I also got the chance to hang out at their apartment for a little while afterward, and got some much needed kitty loving. I very much love my cat, but she's about 650 miles away from me for the majority of the year, so Dean and Laura were wonderful and let me spend some time playing with their little cutie.


Yes, that was an excuse to throw in a picture of an absolutely adorable cat.

Am I sorry?
Psh, please. It's a cat.
Since when does the internet not love cats?

Weekend in NYC - April 24-27

So back in April, I spent a weekend in New York City with my Aunt and Uncle, and my cousins. They were wonderfully accommodating, especially since I wanted to go into every bakery we passed on our wanderings. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a huge thing for French food, ever since I went to France my junior year of high school, and one of my favorites is the French macaron, a delightful sandwich cookie that comes in unimaginable variations.

Sunset at the Tribeca Film Festival

Well, my persistence paid off! We made it to Kee's Chocolates, a wonderfully charming little shop in SoHo. On the website, it says that Kee Ling Tong left her corporate job to pursue her dream of opening a shop selling flowers and chocolates. I am eminently glad she did so! Her macarons are delicious circles of heaven, with a truly delectable chocolate ganache as a filling. I'm a fan of dark chocolate ganaches in macarons, as I feel it cuts the sweetness of the almond and sugar used to create the shell.



Another thing I'm a fan of?

Kee's gorgeous boxes! I kept mine to store jewelry in, because I just can't bear to throw it away.


The ones pictured here are, left to right, cassis, what was supposed to be key lime (more on that later), raspberry, passion fruit, ginger and peach, pineapple and papaya, kaffir lime, and sour sap. I picked up a blood orange with green tea macaron as well, but that didn't live long enough for me to grab a photo. (It was, however, delicious!)

My favorite was definitely the cassis. The tartness of the cassis melded nicely with the sweetness of the shell and chocolate.

All in all, Kee's had some of the more interesting flavors I have ever seen, besides those of Pierre Herme, of course.
(Can anyone beat Ketchup and cornichon for a wierd cookie flavor?)

Oh, and about that key lime situation...
The girl in the shop said it was key lime, but when I tasted it, it tasted much more of jasmine and tea than anything else, and I'm pretty sure the flavors got mixed up. It definitely did not taste like lime, which disappointed me, since I was excited to see how well Kee's would capture the fruity floral taste of the Key lime.

Having never tried Sour Sap fruit, I was intrigued by the cookie, but I'm not sure I like it. It was slightly banana-esque, and I'm not a fan of bananas. Banana bread, on the other hand....

My haul for the day.


We also stopped at another bakery, however I cannot on my life remember the name. They had much smaller macarons, but they were no less tasty. Since I was there, I also picked up a bag of their madeleines, which are another favorite of mine.

See that second bag of macarons in the middle? The girl packing my macarons dropped the bag, and, being as fragile as they are, they shattered, which means I got an extra lemon, apricot and chocolate macaron for free! Turn down free food, me? Never.

As far as I could tell, the flavors included were lemon, pistachio, chocolate, raspberry, coffee and sesame.

Unfortunately, they didn't survive the trip nearly as well as my nicely boxed ones from Kee's.
I particularly liked the sesame iteration. It is delightfully nutty, with a sweet but not overpowering buttercream in the middle. The apricot version was also delicious, sweet, but not cloyingly so. It has apricot preserves in the middle, which are pleasantly tart and provide a great counterpoint to the shell.

The others were fairly standard. I mean, there's only so many ways to improve upon chocolate ganache. The lemon, however, was disappointingly sweet. It tasted like Trix cereal, which is really not the taste one goes for in a cookie of this caliber. I have made lemon macarons before, and I know it's difficult for the lemon to really break through the sometimes cloying sweetness of the almond and sugar.

And that was just one day of my epic New York adventure!
Oh, and a piece of advice for would-be macaron hunters?

Bring a box!

The macs I bought in the bag ended up very sad and squished by the time I made it back to Rochester Monday afternoon.