The longest blog lapse EVER...

I love this blog and many times over the past few months have wanted to write an entry.  But in the midst of working crazy hours and moving, blogging just hasn't been possible. 

Fortunately, this has not been the case with eating.  So I'll leave you with the highlights from my Chicago trip and I promise to write more soon (and by "soon" I mean later this week, NOT three months from now).

Koi, a sushi restaurant in Evanston, had the best sushi I have ever tasted.  It was an excellent recommendation from my office mate - I'm so glad I made it there.  Here were my two favorite dishes -

Chicago Maki - Salmon, avocado, and cream cheese topped with spicy tuna, crabmeat, tobikko, green onion, and sumo sauce

Dragon Fire Maki - Shrimp tempura topped with salmon, super white tuna, tobikko, green onion, spicy mayo, and unagi sauce, the baked and served warm.

I also checked out a local pastry shop, Bennison's.  It was delicious - I tried macaroons, a doughnut, and the sad face cookie (if only because it's awesome they had a sad face cookie).  All were amazing.  Wish I'd had room for the cupcakes though...

My all-time favorite Sesame Street character in cupcake form

Meatless Monday: Quinoa with Black Beans and Cilantro

Last month I promised to make Quinoa with Black Beans and Cilantro, and I finally got around to doing it.  Minus the chopping, which always takes me ages (even with the help of a Slap Chop and food processor), the recipe isn't too difficult and took about 50 minutes.  I substituted olive oil for the vegetable oil, 1 teaspoon of ground red pepper for the 2 teaspoons of chili powder and used a sweet yellow onion instead of a white onion.  The dish was still delicious, even when I reheated it today for lunch.  Definitely a great healthy recipe.  

Ingredients Prior to the Olive Oil Swap

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The final product

The Best Homemade Cupcake Ever

Way back in January, my friends and I made the best homemade cupcakes I have ever had. I was not alone in thinking this - I took them to work, and my coworkers raved. 

A friend got the recipe from a friend, but after an exhaustive search, no one could identify where it was from...but it is too good not to share, so I've included it in this post. If it looks familiar, please let me know the source so I can give credit where it is due (whoever dreamed this recipe up is genius).

CHOCOLATE CUPCAKES WITH PB ICING:

Chocolate Cupcake Ingredients:
Butter, for greasing the pans
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for pans
2 cups sugar
3/4 cups good cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup buttermilk, shaken
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 extra-large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup freshly brewed hot coffee
 
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour the cupcake pans.

Sift the flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, and salt into the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment (or use a use wooden spoon) and mix on low speed until combined. In another bowl, combine the buttermilk (if you don't have buttermilk, use just less than one cup of regular milk and add one tablespoon white vinegar.  Wait 5 minutes.  You can use that instead of buttermilk!), oil, eggs, and vanilla. With the mixer on low speed, slowly add the wet ingredients to the dry. With mixer still on low, add the coffee and stir just to combine, scraping the bottom of the bowl with a rubber spatula. It will be very liquid-y. Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake for 30 minutes, until a cake tester comes out clean. (if you are making a cake, it's 35 - 40 minutes) Cool in the pans for 10 minutes, then turn them out onto a cooling rack and cool completely.  The cupcakes will have flat tops. I filled mine almost up to the top of the cupcake liners.  It made 24 large cupcakes AND 12 mini cupcakes.  The mini cupcakes were a great size actually because they are so rich!

Peanut Butter Icing Ingredients: 
2 cups confectioners' sugar
1 jar of smooth peanut butter

10 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2/3 cup heavy cream

Directions:
Place the confectioners' sugar, peanut butter, butter, vanilla, and salt in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment (I used a regular one since I have a hand mixer w/out a paddle). Mix on medium-low speed until creamy, scraping down the bowl with a rubber spatula as you work. (I mixed until creamy and then whipped until fluffy by hand.) Add the cream and beat on high speed until the mixture is light and smooth.  You will have a little frosting left over after icing all the cupcakes, but this way someone can lick the bowl! :) Plus, the frosting is so good, you want to put a lot of it on the cupcakes! 

End Result
(Snowman decoration courtesy of my mom.)

Meatless Monday: Quinoa Part 2

Last week I vowed to expand my quinoa horizons and take on some quinoa dishes. I planned to make Quinoa with Black Beans and Cilantro, but I experimented with Quinoa Breakfast Porridge instead.  The dish took about 25 minutes from start to finish and is very easy to make. It has a crunchy texture and the almonds accentuate the quinoa's nutty taste. The apricots add flavor, but I think I'd add more than the recipe suggests. It tastes good without sugar, but a little brown sugar would really enhance the cinnamon flavor. In all, it's a breakfast staple in my house! 

Meatless Monday: Quinoa

Last month I heard an NPR story about the rising demand for quinoa that sparked my interest in the seed, which is high in protein and iron. Since then, I've started to see quinoa everywhere - in salads, wraps and on every other shelf at Trader Joe's. Quinoa has a nutty flavor that lendss itself to many dishes, but its more notable for its chewy texture. So far I've had a pretty casual food relationship with quinoa, adding it to lunch wraps and "cooking" frozen Trader Joe's Quinoa Duo with Vegetable Melange dishes, but nothing that requires extensive preparation or effort. If you haven't tried quinoa, easy or pre-prepared dishes are a great place to start.

But now that I've established that I like quinoa and mastered the easy preparation, it's time to stop being lazy and get cooking. So this week, I'm going to try a recipe for Quinoa with Black Beans and Cilantro and post the results in next week's Meatless Monday blog.

Meatless Valentine's Monday: A Day for Chocolates

The best thing about Valentine’s Day is the chocolate.  But as anyone who’s experienced the Russel Stover’s chocolates knows, it can also be extremely scarring when you bite into that mint toothpaste chocolate, or worse, the orange cream chocolate of death. 

Fortunately, DC has some great local chocolatiers, so you can completely avoid the gamble chocolate scenario.  My two favorite chocolate spots are ACKC and Artisan Confections. Best of all, both are mostly meatless (ACKC does offer a bacon chocolate bar but has many delicious meatless options).  So happy Valentine's Day and Meatless Monday!

Zola: Uncommon Service

I never thought it was possible to be scarred by Restaurant Week, but after going to Zola, I now realize how wrong I was.


My friends and I picked Zola mainly because it had a vegetarian-friendly menu, which is surprisingly rare for many featured Restaurant Week establishments. Also, it's website describes it as "beyond cooking, eating, and drinking. It's the promise of an uncommon experience."


It was an uncommon experience, but not in the way the website lead us to believe it would be.


I made reservations weeks in advance, so I was shocked when we arrived and the hostess said she could not find my reservation. Fortunately we had made reservations for early in the evening, so they were able to seat us promptly. Sadly this was probably the best customer service we had the entire night.


Zola has only Restaurant Week options on its menu, so if you don't want a RW meal, you're out of luck. This wouldn't be so bad if the kitchen wasn't out of many of the menu items. Twenty minutes after ordering appetizers, half the table was informed that the appetizer they had chosen was unavailable. Later, the kitchen was out of three dessert items, which is roughly 1/3 of the entire dessert menu!


But missing menu items pale in comparison to the service. My friends and I waited 45 minutes before we got bread, and we had to ask for the bread. Then, we got multiple baskets of bread from various servers. After greedily eating the bread and nursing what was left of our $5 Restaurant Week sangria, it appeared that our appetizers had arrived! But it was a false alarm. When I pointed out to the random server that I did not order the tuna appetizer, she rudely acted like I was making it up! An hour and 15 minutes later, our waiter presented our appetizers to us. Famished, we tried to be patient as he went into great detail describing every dish. Even when there was nothing to describe. When presenting the rutabaga soup, he explained it was "pure rutabaga," before pouring it into the bowl with great flourish. Before he launched into a full-on description of what qualified as "pure rutabaga," we took the opportunity to politely express concern about the situation thus far, noting that the other patrons didn't seem to be having this problem. He was overly sympathetic and brought over the restaurant manager, who was appalled on our behalf and offered us a round of drinks to make the situation right. When one of us couldn't find a drink she wanted on the menu, the manager went out of his way to offer her a custom cocktail. We were cautiously optimistic that things were getting better.

Our hopes were dashed five minutes later when the manager brought out the drinks. Those of us who ordered off the menu had delightful cocktails, but my friend's "custom cocktail" was the $5 Restaurant Week sangria! What's worse is that she had an empty sangria glass in front of her, so it was clear that if she had wanted to refill her sangria, she would not have asked for a custom cocktail. I could understand a mix up like this at Chili's, but at a hyped, pricey restaurant, I expect more.

After the manager resolved the drink fiasco, things got even weirder. The server and the manager dramatically cleared the table. It was too bizarre to describe with complete accuracy, but they were overcompensating so much that it seemed like the were acting in a bad movie. While clearing the table after the appetizers, they made a big show of giving us cheese popovers - this would have been great two hours prior when we were starving and couldn't get bread, but at that point it didn't really make much of a difference. Not to mention, they had another server bring out what looked like Metamucil tablets, but were actually orange meringue pallet cleansers. She handed the dish to me, and I tried to take it to pass around the table, but she wouldn't let go of the plate. This resulted in an awkward tug-of-war that ended with her curtly informing me that I had to take a tablet off the plate, but couldn't take the plate.

You know that point when you are in the midst of something terrible like moving, and you get delirious and start laughing because it's so bad? By the time our main courses came, we were at that point. The manager and waiter ceremoniously presented each dish to us, taking as long as humanly possible introducing each entree. Fortunately the food was delicious, but this was only time in my life when that just didn't matter.

After the main course, we just wanted to leave, but had to wait another ten minutes to have our dessert order taken. But that didn't happen without one of us physically waving the menu in the air to flag someone down. With the three best options unavailable, we suffered through dessert (I never thought it was possible to "suffer" through dessert before that night). The one bright spot was the Sommelier, who chose a lovely dessert wine and actually seemed to understand wine and service.

In all, we were at Zola two and a half hours. Even with comped drinks, the service was so abysmal, the restaurant never redeemed itself. Uncommon indeed.