Category Archives: Food

When it comes to brownies, are you a center-lover or an edge-eater? I’m a corner fan myself… and it looks like this brownie baking tray is just for those of us who like all the edges we can get.

Offering a glimpse of a summer to possibly come, this Greek salad was enjoyed poolside on a day when the temperatures reach into the 90’s – because we can’t just go from winter to spring – we have to have winter, then fall, then winter again, then brutal fall, then winter again… well, you get the sad idea. By the time this gets posted, we may be back in the rainy doldrums, so I’m putting this up to remind myself that there are sunny days behind us, and sunny days ahead.

This salad is simple enough – it’s mostly about the chopping and finding the freshest ingredients. Comprised of garbanzo beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, Kalamata olives, roasted chicken, and lettuce, it’s dressed in a lemon juice, olive oil, oregano, garlic and dijon mustard dressing. (A few sidetracks from a traditional Greek salad as there is no red onion, and I included lettuce for filler.) When it comes to salad, everyone should toss it their own way.

This blog post paraphrases its title from an obscure ‘Golden Girls’ reference – IYKYK.

More important is the combination of condiments at work, here we have some basic ketchup with a basic Peri Peri sauce, for a batch of fries we had with burgers the other night. I love the sort of reverse sunny-side-up egg effect accidentally occurred – the best art is sometimes entirely unintentional, and we have to be open to the whims of the universe.

Chris recently recommended this Peri Peri sauce to me, and he’s been surprisingly accurate in selecting good sauces lately. Just when you think you know a guy, after over thirty years of friendship he goes and surprises you with a flash of good taste. This is why you should never give up on people.

According to the literature and folklore on the walls of the new Qamaria location in Latham, the first cup of coffee was brewed in Yemen, where’s been cultivated and traded for over five hundred years. My caffeine threshold would not stand for any sort of traditional Yemeni coffee, so I opted for their Iced Matcha Latte – about the most caffeine I can safely handle, tempered with a hefty amount of milk. That and the pistachio honeycomb dessert made for a delicate and not-overly-sweet sweet-treat on my first excursion out after a nasty sinus cold. 

Both drink and dessert are subtle and refined (or maybe I still can’t quite taste everything) and the older I get the most I find myself enjoying the less bombastically sweet desserts of mile-high frostings and sundaes spilling over with hot fudge and caramel. On this early spring evening, one of the first without a discernible chill in the air, this green pairing is its own elegant celebration of the season.

Back in the 80’s, the Amsterdam Mall had divided our small hometown literally and figuratively, but for my childhood self, a mall was a beautiful place to roam.

My favorite store, Smile-A-While (pause for gagging), sold novelty soaps, stickers, and the silly stuff that spoke to my very young gay self. In the center of it all was a little food court where Mr. B’s Best (a roast beef sub shop if I recall correctly) and an Orange Julius presided over a dracaena forest. For some reason we rarely ate there (our parents likely considered it too much like junk food to get us an Orange Julius) but I always felt like I would have loved one.

Cut to this day, when the temperatures were happily warm (false spring in full but all-too-brief effect) and I’m taking this Orange Julie Monkey smoothie for a spin at Professor Java’s. It’s their take on the original Orange Julius, and it’s just as lovely as I imagined it to be. It brings me back to the 80’s, when we roamed the mall, when our main concern and worry was in which sticker to select for the week, and where to place it in my sticker book…

Last year’s culinary homage to ‘Babette’s Feast’ gets a revamp with tonight’s planned Mexican dinner party with Suzie and I preparing a multi-course meal that is markedly less extravagant than our previous endeavor.

To inspire and help us prepare, we went out to a Mexican restaurant a few weeks ago, where we laid out our initial menu, brainstormed ideas, and had a horchata and mockarita. (Neither will end up making the cut, as we’re going easier on ourselves and just picking up some Mexican soda at the store.)

Instead, simplicity and abundance are the orders of the day, with a menu including the following, all made from scratch:

~ Salsa roja

~ Salsa verde

~ Guacamole

~ Carnitas

~ Arroz roja

~ Enchiladas in a verde sauce

~ Mexican wedding cookies

Bowls of avocados and limes, and bunches of cilantro to boot. We’re frying our own tortilla chips too!

Though this isn’t a lavender latte (my favorite) it is an admirable replacement of brown sugar vanilla – perhaps the universe feels it’s a more fitting match for the season. I no longer question how the universe works, only our reactions to it. Humans being so supremely out of control in so many practical ways…

A brown sugar vanilla latter it’ll be then, heartfully decorated with the expert design of a seasoned barista. A cup full of hearts. A heart full of latte love.

Is there a more potent elixir against a dreary late-winter afternoon than a bowl of steaming miso soup? Perhaps a bowl of pho could accomplish an equal rendering of heat, but I prefer the basic simplicity of a miso soup – it complements the stark, bare end of winter in a more elegant way.

The occasional cube of tofu, the swirling rings of scallions, and the almost-black jagged clouds of seaweed floating through the broth comprise a bowl that perfectly represents a minimalist stroke of culinary economy – where less is more and the notion of absence as elegance imparts impressive and beautiful restraint.

Winter’s enchantments are often hidden in plain stripped-down sight, but only for those who take the time to slow down and examine – both what is at hand, and what is at heart.

A bowl of miso soup is a wonderful winter thing.

In service of some badly-needed levity on the internet side of life, here is a green rim job on a mockarita from a recent inspirational dinner out as Suzie and I prepare a Mexican-themed dinner fiesta. It’s this year’s take on the ‘Suzette’s Feast’ dinner we threw last winter – a way to make it through the second half of winter, and a Mexican meal feels especially cozy right now.

We’ve worked out a rough menu draft, and the star of the show is going to be one of Pati Jinich’s recipes: Enchiladas Verdes in a tomatillo sauce. But I don’t want to give away all the secrets – a good meal should contain a few surprises.

As for the mockarita and green salty rim as seen here – the only time I want a rim job ON MY DRINK is for a margarita. The sugary ones caked in chocolate or sprinkles are abominations.

I adore a bundt cake.

Somewhere in my childhood there were some very pleasant visits by my Mom’s friends that resulted in her baking and setting out a bundt cake. The specialness of the occasions, and the hint of formality to serving cake and coffee in the living room or formal dining room, appealed to my sense of drama, as well as a basic sense of healthy hunger. The bundt cakes were usually simple and lacking in fancy frosting and whipped toppings – and the elegance of such simplicity appealed to me too.

Today, I still adore a bundt, and this one is especially good. It’s a take on an Italian wedding cake Betsy recently introduced me to at DeFazio’s. Theirs was slightly more moist, so the next time I’ll use all of the liquid glaze (it seemed like too much, but in this case it’s all about too much). The only drawback in all that moisture is that the topping of powdered sugar is almost instantly soaked into the cake. More sweetness, but no tell-tale prettiness, which is not at all a bad payoff when seeking out simplicity.

Betsy once made chocolate chip cookies for an office cookie contest, and they literally had about 2 chocolates chips per cookie. She promptly lost the contest to Heath, who had generously added a reasonable amount of chips to his batter. I always think of that when I order anything with chocolate chips, such as this muffin from Professor Java’s.

It stands as an ideal image of the perfect ratio of chips to muffin, and the almost-scientifically-even spacing and dispersal on display here is a thing of wonder and beauty. Behold its prettiness, as life doesn’t often approach this kind of perfection, especially during the holiday madness, and this makes me extremely happy. As did eating every bite of this chocolate chip muffin.