Food obsessed much?, originally uploaded by meliass.

I’ve tried to do a fair amount of reading this year and it seems that a fair amount of this reading is related to food. That’s not even counting the hours I spend perusing cookbooks.

I suppose that I’ve always had a mild interest in books related to restaurants and food. I bought “Kitchen Confidential” by Anthony Bourdain shortly after it was released years ago and own a few of his other books. I also possess several memoirs about waiting tables.

The real obsession with reading and owning food books didn’t start until late last year when I read “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver. I devoured it and wanted more. So I read “The Omnivore’s Dliemma” by Michael Pollan as 2008 began.

This year I’ve worked through several more food books and have a few more on the shelf waiting to read…not to mention the growing number of them on my amazon.com wishlist.

I’m still reading “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan…but it’s taken a backseat to the new (non food related) David Sedaris book, “When You Are Engulfed in Flames”.

“Julie & Julia” by Julie Powell got me a little obsessed with wanting to read more about Julia Child…and I want the Smithsonian National History Museum to finish their renovation so that I can see her kitchen. Not to mention that I can’t wait to see Meryl Streep as Julia Child in the movie version of this book that will be out next year.

The Ruth Reichl book, “Tender at the Bone” was good entertainment. I have her food critic memoir, “Garlic and Sapphires” on the shelf to read soon. If it’s half as entertaining as “Tender at the Bone”, I’ll be happy with it.

Gosh, I’ve rambled. Food books taste good. I won’t say anything more.

In other news, I’ve got not much to tell. Work is pretty boring. It’s hot, the cranky tourists are in town, and I don’t seem to want to spend much time there as a result of these two things.

The house continues to be built. Very, very slowly. Instead of moving into it at the end of July or beginning of August, we’re now looking at the end of August or beginning of September.

I was a bit disappointed for a couple of days but I’m okay with it now…the boyfriend is going to be so busy with his job in July that moving could have been a bit much. Plus we might get to sneak away to the beach for a few days in August this way. If we were moving in August, we probably wouldn’t have gotten to go.

Now I need to slow down on the packing and cleaning since the move is still at least 2 months away. I got a little ahead of myself and have packed boxes stacked up in the living room…not to mention all the empty boxes in the hallway and in my trunk. No more packing for a while. I’ll repeat that to myself a few more times.

Since it’s summer and hot and we’re not going out of town much, I’m pretty boring. I cook and work and take pictures and read and play on the internet…with the occasional walk in the evening or guest for dinner.

Not too much else at the second…but I do have a bunch of food stuff to post about in the next couple of days.

Tweet This Post 

Corn & Potato Chowder, originally uploaded by meliass.

…of soups I’ve recreated at home after eating them at Panera a few times. First, it was the creamy tomato soup with cheesy croutons. Now it’s their summer corn chowder. I wonder what the next soup I copy from them will be.

I think (I know) my version is a bit healthier than theirs as mine has very little dairy in it.

This has fresh and frozen corn, Yukon Gold potatoes, celery, sweet onions, shallots and red peppers. It was made with chicken stock, thickened with a roux and finished with only a little bit of 2% milk…so it’s a lot healthier than most chowders seem to be. Other than the fact that I topped it with bacon (and green onions).

Soup has kind of turned into the thing I make once a week for us to eat as lunches when there aren’t any other leftovers in the house. Due to this, I’m getting pretty skilled at soup making. I didn’t even use a recipe for this corn and potato chowder…sorry, I had to pat myself on the back. After all, the name of this site is The Boastful Baker.

Tweet This Post 

amaretto cake with raspberry filling, originally uploaded by meliass.

“Uh, that’s, that’s just, er, raspberry jam.” -Ned Flanders, in response to his son’s question

Sorry, I’m watching The Simpsons and that quote just came on as I was about to type a title for this post…which would have been “Amaretto Cake with Raspberry Jam”. Clearly I couldn’t resist using the quote.

I have a bit of an obsession with amaretto in baking…so is it any wonder that I’ve made another amaretto cake?

The cake recipe was adapted from a recipe in Dorie Greenspan’s “Baking: From My Home to Yours”. I added lots of amaretto and almond extract. Lots and lots and lots. You might have gotten a little buzz if you ate a big slice.

Then I brushed the cake with amaretto simple syrup and layered it with raspberry jam and a slightly almondy vanilla buttercream frosting.

I’d like to improve my layer slicing skills…but other than that I was pretty happy with this cake. I’ll probably be making it again soon as my sister has requested one…she’s even offered to pay for it and to drive an hour to pick it up.

Tweet This Post 

made from scratch croissants, originally uploaded by meliass.

I said I’d post about these and now I am.

The boyfriend decided that I needed to challenge myself a little more with the baking. Croissants fit the bill since they do require time and patience to do correctly.

You have to make the dough, let it chill, fold in the butter, let it chill, roll the dough and fold it, let it chill and repeat a couple more times. The “let it chill” stage is at least an hour each time and after you repeat all of the rolling, folding and chilling, you have to let the dough chill again overnight. Then you have to form the croissants and let them rise and then bake them. Don’t try to make these if you don’t have a good attention span and/or won’t be at home all night and part of the next day.

Wow, I’ve made them sound like a royal pain. They really weren’t. I was going to be at home anyway. And they were worth it. Really, they were. They tasted so much better than any croissants you’ve ever had at a store or restaurant. Unless maybe the store or restaurant happened to be in Europe. Those might have been better…I’m just a croissant novice. I can’t claim to be that good. Yet.

I used the recipe in Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook. I chose that particular recipe because it had step-by-step illustrations regarding the folding of the butter and dough. I needed the illustrations.

This recipe called for a pretty hefty 5 sticks of butter. To make this sound a little less bad for you, the recipe made about 45 medium sized croissants. I only ate about 20 of them. So that’s only like 2 or 2 1/2 sticks of butter, right?

I split the dough in two and baked it on two separate days. The first day’s batch wasn’t so great. My oven was too hot and browned the bottoms of the croissants well before they could puff correctly and brown on top. But they still tasted good.

On the second day, I baked them at a much lower temperature and all was well. The pictures here are clearly from the second day.

They were buttery, crisp on top and delicious. I ate well more than my fair share (as previously mentioned)…

Next time (and there will be a next time…soon!) I’ll probably fold the dough a few more times to create more layers…this should make them a bit flakier. I just have to remember to leave a good 24 hours free on my calendar for those croissants.

I should attempt to make homemade puff pastry next. Does anyone even make it from scratch anymore? Has anyone ever had homemade puff pastry?

Also, for the record, these croissants may have been the first homemade ones I’ve ever had.

Tweet This Post 

But I haven’t…

Instead I’m making and eating itty bitty little cakes. Cakes that fit in the palm of a hand. Cakes that can be eaten in just a few bites. Cakes that make you feel like a giant. I’ll post some pictures on Flickr tomorrow when the boyfriend is at work and I can use hog our bandwidth.

In addition to that, I’ve been preoccupied with preliminary cleaning and packing for the move. I’ve gotten rid of a lot of things I don’t need and I plan to get rid of a bunch more…I’ve dropped things off at every thrift store in town.

I’m actually down to just one computer now instead of the three I had just a few days ago. I sold my Windows desktop to one of the restaurants for $100 and I gave my Windows notebook to my mom. I’m down to just my MacBook and couldn’t be happier about that.

I’ve got baked goods to blog about…but not tonight. Tonight I’ve got a pile of magazines to go through and recycle and a trifle to assemble.

Oh, I almost forgot. I have a new email address linked to this site…it’s melissa at melissamckelveydotcom

Pretty hard to remember, huh?

More soon.

Tweet This Post 

made from scratch croissant, originally uploaded by meliass.

I have a huge gash in my right pinkie (from a stupid splash guard in the bar at work that’s made of relatively thin and apparently very sharp metal) and it makes typing rather difficult for me as I do type correctly with all of my fingers. So…no real blog entry for another couple of days.

I’ll post more about the croissant pictured here soon. I’ll probably have a good story or two to tell by that point as well.

Tweet This Post 

me at Reddish Knob

Ben is a friend of a friend…he and some other people were joining some of the campers for a second night. So we made a sign so that he could find the campsite while we were off on the adventure I’ll describe in a second. The sign was made from a Miller Lite box and coal from the previous night’s fire. It worked…they found the site. Sadly, this sign wasn’t as cool as the people down the road that had hung a Budweiser banner and a confederate flag and a Hank Williams, Jr. flag.

The next day turned a little interesting. It was decided that we were going to drive to Reddish Knob…which is (I think) the highest peak in the area…it was supposedly only a 10 mile drive. We arrived 2 1/2 hours later…and my car was a filthy mess after driving on some terrible roads not meant for a Camry. Dirt seeped into everything in my trunk (including all of my clean clothes). We weren’t so happy at that point and took the faster way back to the campsite. The view was pretty…but not worth the 4 1/2 hours we spent in the car on a gorgeous day. We should have been outside hiking or something.

Last thing…on the way back to the campsite, we stopped for gas and this really funny Vespa gang pulled up across the street. I’m so glad Krista took pictures of them. They were definitely the funniest part of the journey to and from Reddish Knob.

I guess I’m blogged out for now. We’re heading to DC for the weekend…with no solid plans other than going to a comedy club tomorrow night. I guess I should look into some exhibits at the museums on The Mall to see if there’s anything we don’t want to miss.

P.S. I really need to figure out spacing with Word Press…when I type entries, I put spaces between the pictures and paragraphs…when I post entries, poof! The spaces are gone. Grrrrrr…..

Tweet This Post 

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookie

I think the bartender in me came out in this set of photos. That and I was going to see the Sex & the City movie that evening…so I might have had Cosmpolitans and martinis on the brain. I came up with the martini idea the night before when I couldn’t sleep because of all the cookie dough and cookies I’d eaten at 11:30 at night.

These are peanut butter chocolate chip cookies…made because of a late night request from the boyfriend. I worked a double shift and got home and he wanted dessert. The strawberry jam bars on the counter apparently weren’t good enough. Nor were the fresh strawberries and Cool Whip in the fridge. He wanted cookies. After triple checking to make sure he wasn’t going to be asleep before I finished baking them, I relented and made the cookies.

The recipe for these is from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home to Yours. I checked it out from the library and kind of wanted to buy it…and miraculously it was marked down to $12.99 when I looked at amazon.com‘s bargain books last week. So I own it now. If it’s still on sale at amazon, buy it! (Whoa, I just tried to find the link to the cookbook on amazon and their site is mysteriously unavailable. Weird.)

I didn’t change the recipe at all other than to add a handful of peanut butter chips in addition to the semi-sweet chocolate chips. I did purposely underbake the cookies because we like them better that way.

Tweet This Post 

Meme Mosaic…Flickr Game

I never do memes…but because this one was flickr related, I couldn’t resist. Go to the link of the picture above to see my actual answers to the questions listed below

Flickr game:

the rules:
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.

the questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

Tweet This Post 

Freshly picked strawberries

Yet another week plus hiatus in posts. I’ve got to do better than this…

So…a couple of Fridays ago, I took the ferry across the James River to Surry for some strawberry picking with two of my friends from work. I hadn’t done this since I was a kid and the two of them had never gone. We had fun and picked 6 gallons of strawberries in about an hour and a half. As young(ish) females, we were in the minority. There were lots of old people, lots of small children and at least a van full of special needs adults (they, for the record, were not at all interested in picking strawberries!).

The lesson I learned while strawberry picking is to remember to put sunblock everywhere. We all put sunblock on our arms and face…but we neglected to put any on our lower back…where our shirts and pants don’t meet when we’re bent over picking strawberries.

Three gallons of strawberries came home with me. We took about a gallon of them with us camping that weekend…they were gobbled up with Cool Whip. Mmm.

The remaining gallons of strawberries were earmarked for jam…but I had so many that I sliced and froze a bunch and kept a bunch more for dipping in Cool Whip.

On to the jam…

I think the picture above looks like some sort of berry murder. I broke that white bowl while mashing them…which is a shame as I used that bowl for EVERYTHING!

So I mashed and mashed and boiled and boiled and when I was done, I had 16 perfect little jars of homemade jam!

If we (and by “we” I mean the boyfriend) don’t eat too much jam, some of you might get a jar of it for Christmas. But I’m not making any promises. We like the homemade jam and might not be able to help ourselves. Plus I gave two jars away to the two friends who helped me pick the strawberries in the first place.

The actual canning process was pretty easy. It took a little bit of time but wasn’t a challenge otherwise. Listening to the popping sound of the jars sealing themselves was pretty damned satisfying.

I do plan to make more things this summer…maybe with peaches, raspberries, blackberries and whatever else I can get large enough quantities of to make it worth my while. Maybe we won’t like some of those quite as much as we like the strawberry jam and maybe you’ll actually get some of those for Christmas.

I guess I’ve said enough for the second…but I’ll try to post more tomorrow about camping and other food and life and all that.

Tweet This Post