Vulturing
Dear MLB Playing Rules Committee,
You should not be able to get the win when you blew the save.
Love,
Maura
paragiraffe I love arugula.
My defunct theme parks
If you grew up in Nashville you probably have fond memories of the Opryland USA theme park. It closed in 1997 and is now the site of a Mills mall. My favorite ride was Chaos, an indoor roller coaster, a hot destination on the warm summer days. Opryland wasn’t the best or biggest theme park, but it was close to home, clean and never overly busy.
Perhaps a little further back in my memories lies the days spent at Rocky Point in Warwick, Rhode Island. Rocky Point also closed, in 1995, although I only recently discovered this. In 2007, the shuttered park’s 150-year history was the subject of a documentary film, You Must Be This Tall. Frustratingly, it’s not available on Netflix, but I did enjoy clips on their YouTube page. There’s actually quite the treasure trove of information online about Rocky Point and other defunct theme parks, such as this map of the park or this commercial on YouTube, which I still have memorized.
The Cleve
For Shaun’s birthday this past Friday, we went to Cleveland for the weekend. That may seem weird, but, trust me, if you go and eat at Michael Symon’s Lola, it will seem a lot less weird.
Cleveland has a great art museum, baseball, basketball, football…
And the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.
Half
Last weekend, I ran a half marathon. Sometime in January, I (arguably stupidly) decided that training for one would be a good idea. At that time, the local ING half marathon was too close, so I decided on the Country Music half marathon in Nashville.
I’ll cut right to the chase and say that I didn’t do as well at the race as I was hoping. I walked too much, but more importantly I psyched myself out and let the distance beat me mentally. It’s a good event, a pretty good course, and I would do it again.
What I can say is that the training itself was invaluable. Three months ago, I never ran longer than a 5K on the weekdays, and a five-mile run on the weekend would knock me out for the afternoon. Now five miles could be a typical weekday run, and I would want to get in eight on the weekend. I found I actually got faster the longer I ran, at least until the point that fatigue set in. I ran ten miles twice without water or Gatorade or a gel. In fact, I kind of hate the idea of gels.
The training was also eventful. There were days that sucked and days that I felt on top of the world. On my first ten-mile run, I collided with a biker near the end. One Friday night, a car knocked me down in a crosswalk, causing a giant bruise on my elbow where I broke my fall. So, technically, I got hit by a car.
One thing I won’t miss is waking up with foot pain every day and pretty much only being able to wear sneakers. One thing I will miss is being able to eat just about anything I wanted!
Thomas Keller’s chicken potpie
Yesterday was the first day of spring, and, naturally, we celebrated not with asparagus or a fresh salad, but with a hot, labor-intensive, calorie-laden, savory pie. I figure I deserve it after running nine miles.
Shaun got me Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home for Valentine’s Day. (This is a beautiful, beautiful book, by the way.) Besides drooling over the photos on numerous occasions, I hadn’t made anything from it yet. Sure, it’s family-style food, but the recipes are pretty involved. I’m glad I didn’t wait any longer.
Of course you start by doing a pie crust from scratch, cooking all of the vegetables individually and making a béchamel. But Keller’s recipe has obviously been well-tested because it yields just the right amount of filling and sauce for the pie.
Oh, and this is the best chicken potpie I have eaten ever. Ever.
Fried chickpeas with chorizo and spinach
There are some food combinations that I am a sucker for. I adore pork, I adore tomatillos and I adore Mexican food, and the combination of these three is my food bliss. Peanut butter and chocolate. Onions and peppers. I also happen to love chorizo, chickpeas and spinach.
Sidenote: I try to get spinach into everything. Seriously. Ask Shaun. I’ll wait.
Recently, Mark Bittman got these three together for a flavorful and easy dish, and tonight I ate it.
This is a great weeknight dinner — filling and inexpensive, light on meat, full of leafy greens. The breadcrumbs added at the end provide a great texture and perhaps more importantly a touch of what I’ll call delicious carb-y-ness. I threw in an onion at the beginning, and I could see a chopped bell pepper working as well.
What are you waiting for?
iPhone food
Here is some food I have photographed with my iPhone lately.
This is the carne asada taco, the shrimp sope and the pork tamale at Bone Garden Cantina. It was a little too much food for lunch, but I’m not complaining.
I was finally able to make it to Antico Pizza, considered to be Atlanta’s best pizza. You really need to go there and eat it immediately out of the oven; it does not keep well. But it was quite good and to date is the best pizza I’ve had in the city.
I actually didn’t eat this one (a friend of mine did), but this is the Sublime burger at my local watering hole, Cypress Street Pint & Plate. Sublime Doughnuts is a local, excellent doughnut shop, so this is a burger served on a doughnut “bun.” I was thinking about this a little bit, because Cypress actually serves all of their burgers and sandwiches on giant, delicious ciabatta rolls, so it’s feasible the doughnut might make a slightly lower calorie bun. No? It was worth a shot.
Feb 12
With Valentine’s Day falling on a Sunday this year, yesterday, Friday, would seem to be the day to bring in a love-inspired baked good for my coworkers. Oh, and I always let Shaun try whatever I make.
I am a sucker for cookie cutters, but I have gotten increasingly lazy about rolling out dough. Since I have adorable, graduated heart cookie cutters that I haven’t used in years, I resolved to make roll-out cookies this year. I had a small, time-saving idea: I used my pasta machine. There are just a couple caveats to this method. First, even on the largest width setting, the dough is still pretty thin for a cookie, so you have to be going for that. Second, the result is a long, thin dough, so you can’t have that large of a cutter. I made tiny hearts. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with them, but in the end I filled them with buttercream for tiny Oreos.
I’ve made homemade Oreos before, from (of couse) Smitten Kitchen. I actually used her brownie roll-out cookies recipe this time, and although mine were much thinner, they stayed soft and tasty.
We ate them all up, then headed home because (OMG) snow!
Super Bowl food
It’s time for another edition of Super Bowl food. Again, Shaun and I had a party but didn’t invite anyone, and our theme was Mexican. Why? What, you need an excuse to eat Mexican food?
First, we had guacamole and chips. Pretty standard.
Next, we spent a lot of time making pork tamales with tomatillo salsa.
My stove is so dirty. Would you believe I cleaned today?
Not pictured: margaritas. Many margaritas.
Finally, I made tres leches cake.
I spent some time the past couple of weeks looking at tres leches cake recipes and deciding what I wanted to do. First, there is this Martha Stewart Recipe, which I admired for its straightforwardness. Also, there was The Pioneer Woman’s recipe, which has a couple of extra ingredients I liked (vanilla extract, baking powder for extra rising). What I liked about both recipes is they do not contain butter. Butter makes cakes heavy; tres leches cake should be light. One concern I had was Shaun and I trying to eat the leftovers of a 9 x 13 inch cake, so I went for half. Here’s what I did.
Tres Leches Cake
- ½ cup flour (I used white whole wheat)
- ¾ teaspoon baking powder
- pinch salt
- 3 whole eggs
- ½ cup sugar, divided
- ½ teaspoon vanilla
- 1 can (14 oz) sweetened condensed milk
- 1 can (12 oz) evaporated milk
- ½ cup milk (any milk you have on hand is fine)
Preheat oven to 350°. Butter (or spray) a 8 x 8 inch pan.
Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Separate eggs.
Beat egg yolks with ¼ cup sugar on high speed until yolks are pale yellow. Stir in milk and vanilla. Pour egg yolk mixture over the flour mixture and stir very gently until combined.
Beat egg whites on high speed until soft peaks form. With the mixer on, pour in remaining ¼ cup sugar and beat until egg whites are stiff but not dry.
Fold egg white mixture into the batter very gently until just combined. Pour into prepared pan and spread to even out the surface.
Bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
Whisk together condensed and evaporated milk. Save or discard half. (I know, I know, I hate throwing away food, but I hate being fat more.) Whisk in milk and pour milk mixture over cake. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate 1 to 24 hours.
You can frost this cake with sweetened whipped cream (as I did) or with a meringue (or seven minute frosting) as they do at Atlanta’s best place for tres leches cake, Tierra.
Skillet cookie!
This may be the fastest internet-to-stomach recipe I have found. On Thursday night, I saw this recipe for a chocolate chip cooke in a skillet on Ezra Pound Cake. Being a sucker for anything cooked in a cast iron skillet, this went in my to-make queue, at the top.
I made these to have for dessert tonight, and I ate mine while registering for a half marathon, which seemed appropriate. I went a little shy on the cooking time to make sure they would be soft in the middle. The edges are deliciously crispy. Now, someone come over and help me eat them all!