49 posts tagged “food”

It is no secret that I have a soft spot in my heart for Jeff Ruby restaurants, ever since the fabulous experience we had at The Waterfront back in October. I have a rule with restaurants lately: if I can cook my food better than you can cook my food, I'm probably not a happy girl. I make a mean steak - but Jeff Ruby's are, well, meaner.

Even though I guessed my birthday present nine days early (and he still gave it to me!), my husband still decided to take me out for a nice meal when I turned the big 2-3 last Friday. He made an 8:30 reservation at The Precinct. The Precinct is sort of "the" steak restaurant to go to in Cincinnati. There are others that are very good - hell, all the Jeff Ruby restaurants are known for their steak - but if anyone asks where you can get a good steak here, they're probably going to end up at this one.

I suppose I should be embarrassed, in hindsight, that I ordered basically the exact same thing I ordered when we went to the Waterfront. I'd be embarrassed if it wasn't so fantastic, but luckily for me, it is fantastic. I had the Steak Collinsworth, the Cincinnati version of Steak Oscar (filet, two sauces, king crab and asparagus), and John had the Steak a la Roth (pepper-crusted filet). We also ordered the shrimp and crab saute as an appetizer.

I have to say that the shrimp and crab dish was the most disappointing part of the meal. Neither one of us likes mushrooms (the horror, I know), and this had significantly more mushroom than seafood in it. The seafood was fabulous, when you could find it - and even as a mushroom hater, it was still fairly tasty. I just wish the mushrooms had been mentioned ahead of time.

The steaks were, of course, amazing. Both were cooked to perfection. While I am rarely a fan of sauces with my steak, I could have absolutely licked my plate. There was a generous piece of king crab on top of mine - enough that I didn't mind giving John half - and the asparagus was delightful. The steaks come with a side salad and your choice of potato. John and I both opted for the garlic mashed potatoes. Tasting these made me feel like I should modify my recipe - I use minced garlic in my garlic mashed potatoes, but the roasted garlic in theirs is a really nice, rustic touch.

We each had a glass of wine - a Zinfandel for me, Shiraz for him - and two drinks at the bar before our table was ready. As per usual, I'm a little ashamed that I didn't write them down, but I never remember to do that. We passed on dessert because we were absolutely stuffed.

Also, Jeff Ruby's restaurants serve bread with two kinds of butter. One of them is a mushroom butter made with what tastes like a little bit of white truffle oil. They should probably start selling this so I can buy it by the pound. Mushroom hater or not, I cannot get enough of this butter. It's lovely.

Our bill wasn't nearly as expensive as The Waterfront, but we also just went with steak instead of adding on seafood. It's definitely still a nicer restaurant, but not unreasonable. Most steaks are in the $35 range, and the appetizers are about $10. Seafood will cost you a pretty penny, but as we learned with our last Jeff Ruby experience, it's worth it if you can spare the change. Their wine list is extensive and includes many bottles at decent prices, but they have a good selection by the glass as well. We were so stuffed from the food, we could barely finish our wine as it was - we never would have been able to finish off a bottle between the two of us!

A fantastic experience - perfect for a special occasion. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Oh, internet. It's college basketball time, and that usually means I'm ignoring you. But with St. Mary's, Gonzaga and Drake losing today, and with UConn currently trailing, I just don't have the emotional ability to handle watching it right now. (Just so everyone knows, I only lost two teams out of my bracket yesterday, and 14/16 right ain't half bad. But today, today is another story.)

Instead of telling you about how awesome basketball is, I'm going to tell you why you should be jealous of me. And the reason you should be jealous of me today is because I recently discovered BlakeMakes.com, and you probably haven't. And since you haven't discovered it until today, you haven't eaten any of his Peanut Butter Dulce de Leche, and you haven't had any free Tcho chocolate.

Since I discovered him already, I have done both. THAT is why you are jealous of me.

First of all, the food blogosphere is currently blowing up about him, so it's not like I'm the first to promote him. Google around and you'll find entirely too many of us swooning. The real beauty is in the recipes he posts - the extra bonus is the fact that there are food giveaways.

I first found him through twitter - or, to be more appropriate, he found me. He added me as a friend, and I added him back. When I posted my valentine's day menu, including peanut butter ice cream, he asked me if I had heard about the Peanut Butter Dulce de Leche that he had been giving away free samples of. No, I hadn't, but I was about to. I was lucky (read as: obsessive) enough to have a fast mouse button on a day that he was giving away mini samples. Shortly, a little white box containing a little glass jar came to me.

Let me paint a picture for you, one that you may well understand if you feel the same way about food that I do. So it's Tuesday, and you start to plan out the food you're going to make on Thursday. It's not like there's a special occasion or anything, it's just what you do. You get a fabulous pot roast recipe from a good friend. The new issue of Cook's Illustrated re-visits the no-knead bread phenomenon from a year ago that you always wanted to jump on but didn't have a dutch oven when it first came out and when you finally got one, everyone was already over it. One of your favorite co-workers is turning 31 and needs birthday treats. Your company is closing down for a week and a half and you want to bring in something tasty to remind them all that they're going to miss you.

The stars are in line for you to do some serious cooking. You go to the grocery store and you find the bread flour that they never seem to have in stock when you need it. You find the difficult-to-locate ingredients for your famous cornbread. You remember a brownie recipe from months ago and you already have everything you need for them. Then you get the feeling that something's about to go awry.

And, sure enough, it does. And when it does, despite the fact that you've made the best loaf of bread ever and that your friend's pot roast was a success, when your muffins get a little overcooked and your brownies are ruined by some act of God, you decide you're a failure. It destroys your other successes and makes you forget that you FINALLY perfected a loaf of bread after a year of awful bread experiences. So, you mope in your recliner and curl up with the amazing book that a special friend got you for Christmas and you get more fussy because you're reading about all the good food in the world that you will never be able to cook because you have lost the gift of cooking.

Perhaps this little story only makes sense if you're me, or if you were one of the two people that had to be in the house with me when I discovered that I had somehow ruined the brownies despite following the recipe to the letter. In the holiday spirit, though, I have decided to move on and not dwell on the failures. The successes deserve much, much better than that.

First of all, the pot roast. I have said before that I really, really like pot roasts. I've also mentioned that though I don't use it so often, I really like my crock pot. So when I mentioned on twitter that I was interested in good crock pot recipes, imagine my delight when I received this message from michelle:

I have a crock pot standard. Pot roast, veggies, rosemary, 1/4 c H20, and a bottle of beer. Simple. Tasty. It's the beer that adds.

She was right. The meat turned out perfect. Cook's Illustrated has an article this month about using inferior cuts of meat for roasts if you cook them properly, and this was a great example. I used a sort of crappy roast, seared it before putting it in the crock pot for some extra flavor, and left it for the whole day with just some beer, rosemary, potatoes and carrots. I won't even attempt to tell you about how the house smelled when I got home, because it was just too amazing.

And then, there's the bread. Do you remember the no-knead bread phenomenon from last year? A combination of Mark Bittman and Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street Bakery produced a recipe that involves no kneading, and can be done in your home in a dutch oven. The internet blew up. Every food blogger was posting about it. I didn't jump on the trend then, but I am surely on it now. Cook's Illustrated revisited it, and I used their variation. I'll post the recipe when I get home tonight (thanks, downtime at work!), but for now, I leave you with pictures.

You should be making this bread. Seriously. The new version requires just a little bit of kneading - a task my husband was kind enough to do since I was stuck at the job that pays for the five different types of flour I keep in my kitchen. (All purpose, semolina, pastry, bread, Italian 00 - if you were curious.) The secret is a very, very long rise. I made my dough on Wednesday night around 1 a.m. and put it in the oven around 6 the next evening. Delicious, hassle-free, and so easy!

I alluded to them earlier in the week, so as promised, here we go.

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that our office was having a cupcake competition. I work in what you might describe as an obnoxiously creative office. I knew I had to go for taste, as even though I'm a designer, I'm just awful at decorating food. I cook it, and I can plate things well, but when it comes to icing, there's just no winning for me. So, my co-workers banded together and tried to help me come up with ridiculously strange cupcake ideas. Someone suggested "meat cupcake", someone else suggested "breakfast cupcake", and then it came to me. I would have to put bacon in a cupcake.

Credit definitely goes to the Vanilla Garlic blog, because I never would have perfected these if I hadn't started from their fabulous recipe. I kept the recipe relatively similar, except I used more of the pan drippings and used a full teaspoon of baking powder with regular all-purpose flour instead of the self-rising. I didn't use their recipe for the frosting - I made a basic buttercream icing and added some maple syrup to it.

A few warnings about using maple syrup in a batter. It's pretty easy to add too much and break a batter. I definitely cut down the amount of syrup in the batter itself - I ended up tripling that recipe so I could make enough to send to my office and John's. That would have required 12 tablespoons of maple syrup, and I only used 8.

The recipe isn't too difficult. Step one is to fry up some bacon. Fry up as much as you'd like - for a triple batch, I used a pound. You'll be chopping this up later and folding it in to the batter, so fry it to whatever crispy point you want to have in your cupcakes. As I knew people would be a little weirded out by the idea of bacon in their cupcakes, I made mine pretty crispy - the type of thing you'd get in store-bought bacon bits as opposed to a little soft like I want to eat in strips. Pour out the pan drippings and put them in the refrigerator to cool. (Don't pour it directly from your pan into a Glad storage container, because it'll melt the bottom and you'll lose some of the drippings while you scream and look for another container. Trust me.)

When the bacon drippings have cooled and solidified, you're going to beat them with the butter until it's light and fluffy. Add in the brown sugar and maple syrup and beat until they're well combined, then add the egg. Then you'll mix in your dry ingredients that you've pre-sifted together - flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder. Alternate between adding some of the dry ingredients, then milk, ending with the dry. I have made these twice, and I used more milk in the first batch. It made the end product a little more moist. Probably should have done that for the second batch. End by folding in the bacon.

You'll note that I'm not giving quantities here, and that's mostly so you can defer to the Vanilla Garlic recipe. It's a great starter. Pay attention to the quantity of that recipe, though. It claims it makes six cupcakes, but if you use extra baking powder instead of the self rising flour, I think their version will get you closer to ten. This was an experimental recipe to start with, so most definitely experiment with it on your own if you're interested!

As for the taste? Well, I liked them. I thought they were great. They're incredibly rich, though. My less-syrupy version wasn't terribly sweet, but they're a lot of flavor. Also, mine rose a TON. I didn't expect that on the first batch, so I had some incredibly awful looking cupcakes. If you put syrup in your frosting, be aware that it's going to be very, very sweet. I think the sweet syrupy frosting in moderation is a good choice.

I didn't take the grand prize, because as I expected, they were mostly judging on look. I did, however, take one of the special prizes - most unexplained. I couldn't be prouder.

On Friday, I went to John's company Christmas party. It was at the Cincinnati Club, and it was a great event. I got to spend time with Michelle and Kevin, we took a very cute holiday picture, and I still managed to get in bed by 12:30, so I didn't feel awful about going out when I was still getting over an ear infection. This meant that I didn't get to check my email on Friday night. When I woke up Saturday morning, my inbox was full to an extreme that hasn't happened since I went to Kansas City two months ago and went on the four-day no-internet binge.

The explanation is that I made the Vox front page again thanks to the [this is good] feature. I'd like to pretend that I'm really funny, but I only deserve credit for having a decent memory and the good sense to marry a husband who doesn't know how funny he is. I gained a whole lot of new neighbors out of the deal, and I've been enjoying going back through many of your entries. I'm looking forward to getting to know all of you!

So, there's the welcome, and here's the promise - I've solved the problem of what I'll be making for the cupcake competition on Friday. I made a small batch tonight to make sure they were award-winning, and I wasn't disappointed. Here's your hints: Bacon. Nutmeg. Maple.

The full story will be here later this week, I promise. It'll come with pictures. I wouldn't disappoint you. Before I can get all that together, I've got to bake the final batch, finish my story for the next issue of Taste, finish an animation for the job that pays my Fresh Market tab AND make some decisions about my portfolio. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I can make all those things happen by Friday.

I've been thinking about it for awhile, and now that the holidays are upon us, I think it's time. I get asked constantly about kitchen equipment - what you should buy, how much you should spend on it, what's the best brand for X, why is Y product so much more expensive than Z, etc.

For December, I'm going to work on writing some recommendations for the home kitchen. Considering the source, expect things to be fairly minimalist - I own a house that is 865 square feet, and while the kitchen is suitable for my needs, that's only because I refuse to fill it with unnecessary products.

If anyone has good suggestions on what I should write about, let me know in the comments - in the meantime, I'll be assembling my favorite products and gearing up to post the first version in the next couple of days.

(A short post today, because I've only got a few minutes before my black bottom cupcakes come out of the oven. I couldn't be any more excited!)  

So, I didn't really make NaBloPoMo. It happens. It's been a busy month in my life, and December is about to be much, much worse.

I'll leave you with an image of my favorite comfort food of 2007. Have you ever had spanakopita? I don't mean the spanakopita that's kind of dry and awful that you get at your local Greek takeout place. I mean spanakopita carefully crafted by a Greek grandmother that's been making it for decades. I am the closest to a Greek grandmother that most of my friends are going to get, so they deal with mine. I hesitate to share the recipe with you, because it's my go-to food when I need to impress someone in under ten minutes. We're all friends here, so I've decided to give it up.

Most spanakopita is sold in triangle shapes, but I'm sort of lazy. My version comes in a 9x13 casserole dish, and it's cut into squares. It's delicious, easy to make, and not terribly expensive.

I honestly think this is a recipe to experiment with, though many people will probably disagree with me. My basic recipe is a little adapted from my mother's: two bricks of frozen chopped spinach, a pound of crumbled feta cheese, eight ounces of cream cheese, two tablespoons of minced onion and three eggs. Mix it all together (defrost the spinach and drain it first), and put it between about 16 sheets of phyllo.

My basic phyllo technique requires defrosted phyllo. You can try to buy it and use it the same day, but that never works for me. You can find phyllo in your grocery store with all the frozen pie crusts. Throw it in your fridge and it'll last for months. (Three or four, to be exact.) Melt two sticks of butter, and get a pastry brush. Brush the inside of a casserole dish, then lay down two sheets of phyllo. Brush those with butter and lay down two more sheets. Repeat until you've got about eight sheets on the bottom, pour in the spinach and cheese mixture, and repeat with the sheets on top. Put as many sheets on there as you like, really. I do about eight, but with how delicious the buttery phyllo was last night, I'm about to upgrade it to twelve.

It takes ten minutes to throw this together. Bake it about 35 minutes at 350, or until the phyllo is golden and crispy. Reheat it, share it with your friends - it's a recipe for everyone.

Happy NaBloPoMo, everyone. It's been a pleasure seeing many of you succeed. We'll keep our fingers crossed for more success from me next year.

I'm sitting at my desk today, working diligently as per usual, when an email came that would change the course of the next two weeks of my life. Office restructuring? Much more important than that. A new project? Well, sort of. This email, my friends, refers to a cupcake challenge.

A CHALLENGE. A competition. About. Food.

Now, I'm not much of a baker, but I am a fabulous cook, and I don't like to lose. Cupcake time is on.

I don't even particularly like cupcakes. I'm in it for the power.

So, folks, you might be seeing a whole lot of cupcakes from me over the next couple of weeks. The challenge is on December 14th. I've got some interesting ideas in the works, but tonight was all about simplicity and technique. A simple chocolate cupcake with vanilla buttercream frosting. Sure, it's not the best cupcake I've ever had, but that's why I'm doing some practice runs. With great power comes great responsibility, and today I was granted the power of cupcakes.

I'm sure I should be embarrassed by this statement, but I'm simply not: I am one of those self-righteous jerks that regularly turns my nose up at chain restaurants. This rule, as with most "rules" of mine, is not without exception. I legitimately like the fajitas from Chili's. I love the roasted garlic sauce from Romano's Macaroni Grill. I order pizza from Pizza Hut fairly often, I really love Chipotle burritos, I've had a couple great meals from the Cheesecake Factory and I ate at Panera Bread so much in high school that I probably own a part of the company.

With all of these exceptions, though, it seems like I don't have a real rule. The rule comes from the fact that I am usually disappointed with chain restaurants. The photos on the menu lie to you, don't they? Everything looks so great and sounds fantastic and then it gets to you and it's just a disappointment. I've been drawn in by their comparatively lower prices (I can't get a 10 ounce sirloin at a steakhouse for $10, but I can probably find one at Applebee's for close to that), but the quality is rarely at a level I appreciate. It's standard food. I don't remember the last time I was blown away by something at a chain restaurant - until yesterday.

Do we all remember a week or two ago when I was whining about my lunch options around my office? How I really wanted pasta but couldn't find anywhere to get it? All of that changed yesterday, when I was introduced to the lunch menu at McCormick and Schmick's. If you live in a larger town, you might have one of these. A new one recently opened in Cincinnati on Fountain Square. They specialize in seafood - the menus are paper because they change based on what's fresh that day. John and I decided we wanted to sit down to a nicer lunch to celebrate the end of a difficult work week, and the sit-down choices around our offices are mostly food court mall food or unbelievably expensive food. McCormick and Schmick's was our best option.

And boy, was it ever. Fettucine alfredo with scallops and shrimp - I know it's not the most innovative dish in the world. It's four ingredients. But those four ingredients were cooked perfectly, and that's the kind of food that really gets me going. The scallops were so tender, they simply melted in your mouth. The alfredo sauce was rich and creamy. I couldn't have asked for a better lunch - and it was $13. I am convinced that I couldn't have found a meal within half a mile of my office that hit the spot as much as my lunch did yesterday. John had the tilapia, which was great, but I'm partial to mine. I'm sure he understands.

While M&S wasn't enough to make me totally re-think my "rule", it did confirm that I should still give the occasional chain restaurant a try. I couldn't have been more impressed, and I'm unbelievably excited to try their $1.95/3.95 happy hour menu sometime soon.