Jorpblog

Bread fanatics, zoom in on this photo and look at that beatiful texture. I don’t mind bragging, because it’s not really my recipe. It came from a guy named Jim Lahey who has a bakery in Manhattan. I’ll be in the neighborhood in a couple weeks and would love to stop by to give props and scope out the other goods. But it happens to be Passover (my occasion for visiting, in fact), and though I don’t really observe the no bread rule, I might get swept up in something and feel the need to avoid the bakery scene. Still, New York, land of cupcakes, how can I miss out on that?

Anyway, this is the bread I wrote about before that has no kneading required, only I substituted some flours and added carroway seeds to make it rye. If you don’t know about this recipe and are even remotely interested in baking your own bread, drop me a line and I’ll get you going with this one.

Here are the donuts with frosting. It was actually too sugary for my taste. Kinda made your teeth start chattering uncontrollably. Next time I’ll ease off the powdered sugar and use a darker chocolate.

Although it wasn’t on my short list of foods to learn how to make this year, I was inspired about a week ago to make donuts.

Once an addiction, then a guilty pleasure, now practically just a memory; I decided that if I could make my own donuts, they’d be healthy.

They weren’t quite up to Bennison’s quality, but they kicked Dunkin’ Donuts ass! And, of course, they were made with organic ingredients, including the chocolate frosting that went on after this photo.

The heart-shaped world I live in is mostly due to Sara’s needing to buy any kitchen item that is shaped like a heart (waffle iron, casserole, cookie cutters, pancake pan, etc.) But there really is a lot of love that goes into these old fashioned donuts. Also a lot of oil–they are fried cake, after all.

Now if I could figure out how to make heart-shaped bagels…

They don’t look so appealing, but they all got eaten. One tray was chocolate, the other vanilla, and since I’d made both recipes before and they weren’t devoured as quickly, I’m going to guess that it was the freshness that made these go over so well. Or maybe the hungry musicians in attendance would have eaten any food with the word “cake” in it.

Crystal had just moved back into her old place, but had it together enough to host a green party in honor of Heather’s birthday, Spring and St. Patrick’s Day.

There were green flashing sunglasses, LOTS of green clothing, green salsa, green guacamole, green hair, green cupcakes (see next entry), and, yes, green Irish Cream Pie. I didn’t manage to try that one, but I’m not really a fan of any color of cream pie.

For Heather’s first 29th birthday we went to Icosium Kafe, which is on the corner of Clark & Foster where a number of restaurants have failed to survive more than a couple years. I hope this one makes it.

The crepes are enormous, the ingredient list is endless, and the coffee is really good too (I think Pong is having a Turkish coffee here). Even the potatoes were good. They tend towards more advanced crepes (their specialties are filled with things like pine nuts, pineapple, goat cheese, etc.), but you can get the basics too. And being an Algerian Creperie, the atmosphere and music is North African–very cool!

So there’s a museum in Switzerland that is putting on an exhibition called “We Are All Photographers Now!” The deal is that you upload your photos, and then they randomly project them onto a wall in the museum and send you a photo of that occurrence.

Well, I thought I had some good ones, so I sent them in. This is one of four that they put up. Their photo of the photo is not great (I guess we’re not all photographers now!), and who knows how long they were up for.

Anyway, you can see the original photo here.