Dressing up hummus and pita

Hey, Mary!


Have you seen June's Everyday Food? I'm only halfway through and I've flagged a bunch of recipes and ideas. The one I'm most excited to try is on page 17: Cucumber and Celery Salad with Tuna. Okay, so it doesn't sound like much. But listen. It's crunchy, it's healthy, and I'm thinking it's the thing that's been missing from one of my best no-cook summer meals, hummus in pita bread. I know, kind of boring on its own. Almost just a snack. That's been my only problem with it. Until now. Add the salad, add maybe some olives or tomatoes. Mmm! One more reason to look forward to weather too warm for cooking!

Birthday Cake(s)

So, my birthday is tomorrow, and it falls to me (now that I'm away from my mother cum birthday-cake-baker in college) to bake my birthday cake. Not that I'm excited or anything, but I've recently been scouring marthastewart.com and my cookbooks for inspiration. I think I've settled on two frontrunners:

Flourless Carrot Cake

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/health/nutrition

/11recipehealth.html?scp=1&sq=flourless%20carrot%20cake&st=cse

and

London Cheesecake

http://www.nigella.com/recipes/view/london-cheesecake-147

Surprisingly, no death by chocolate this year - maybe.

Which one looks better to you?

Stuffed. . . but not to the brim

I've been here in my sister's house for nearly 2 months already, and I've barely eaten the same thing twice. Though I'm at work most of the day, I come home and put on my sous-chef hat. Literally.

As my sister whips up dinner for her family, I chop garlic, cry my way through piles of onions, and "taste test" soups and cake batters. Taste testing is the best part of sous-cheffery, by the way. My sister's daily challenge is to come up with a menu that will tempt her young children but still satiate her husband's and our own more "grown-up" palates. My favorite (so far) of her creations has been cinnamon-laced refried beans and brown rice for Mexican fiesta night. With a little sangria (*ahem*) grown-up grape juice, I'm transported to Mexico for a night worth writing home about.

The Great Milk Debate

Me: Who wants milk with their cereal?

Niece & nephew: Me!

Me: Whole milk for you and you, skim milk for me.

. . .

Nephew: Why is your milk so gloomy?

My sister moves in.

Three months.

Two sisters.

One kitchen.


It's hard to decide what to cook first!

Sugar High

I was recently browsing in my local Indian grocery, looking for out-of-the-ordinary ingredients to spice up my week's lunches. As I passed the melons, a familiar smell wafted toward me. The culprit was jackfruit, a fruit unfamiliar to most of us who are used to apples, oranges, and the like.

I first encountered jackfruit in the Philippines. It's a large fruit, a little larger than a cantaloupe, whose sickly sweet fruit is enrobed in a spiky green rind. The smell of the cut fruit is exactly like, no joke, Laffy Taffy: you can tell you're in for a sweet treat.

Before getting to the treat, however, cutting the fruit out of its rind is rather a process. The lobes of fruit are trapped in strong, sticky fibers which must be cut with a sharp knife. To top it off, the stickiness of the task requires some vigorous hand-scrubbing.

But the reward is worth the work. Tasting is believing.

A Bacon Birthday

In case you haven't noticed, bacon is in. Not that it was ever out, it's just that bacon seems to be popping up everywhere: on burgers, in salads, in chocolates, even in cookies. Like the now-ubiquitous fried egg, anything topped with bacon is worthy of notice.

So it came as no surprise when I was invited recently to a bacon birthday party. Instead of presents, the birthday girl was asking her guests to bring something deliciously bacon-y to share with the rest of the lucky revelers. Not that bacon isn't wonderful in its simplest form, but I did a little hunting and decided to make Breakfast Cookies, which I found on a blog completely devoted to bacon recipes (genius). These cookies are, shall we say, unexpected: they are flavored with oatmeal, brown sugar, and orange juice, not to mention the aforesaid bacon.

These cookies were very well-received by the party-goers, as were the bacon-wrapped dates, the bacon-cinnamon donuts, and the bacon brownies. But be warned: should you bake these bacon cookies for yourself, be prepared for doubters' wary looks when you describe the cookies: tasting is truly believing.