Saturday in Raleigh

A Saturday or three ago, I went off on a grand adventure, the likes of which have never been seen. I roamed Raleigh. I know, I am such a sojourner. I had met a church friend for coffee at Third Place (fabulous cinnamon chocolate chip cookies) about a month in to me living here, and absolutely loved the coffee, shop, and area. It is in an area of Raleigh called Five Points (because five roads converge and one large and confusing intersection). There is the coffee shop, Lilly's Pizza (renowned throughout Raleigh), antique stores and NOFO at the Pig, a cafe/cute gift store. The store is a converted Piggly Wiggly and, in homage, they have cute pig sculptures around the parking lot...

Goal for NOFO: to eat on the patio there on a breezy sunny day and to buy something unique and fun at the store...or at least some fudge.

After wandering around there, I decided to see what was going on at the Farmer's Market. I wish I lived closer to the market, because I would go there for all my produce instead of the grocery store. It is nice to taste before you buy, talk with the people who grow and pick the food, and build a relationship with some vendors beyond "that will be $21.56."

When I went, there were tons and tons of strawberries. If one wished to, one could gorge oneself on strawberry samples. Come June it will be peach samples...mmm. There is always a great selection of veggies - from Vidalia onions to turnips to lettuce to peppers. I think the Farmer's Market is one of the few places where dirt on produce is a comforting sight.

Further down in the same produce building is a little garden/nursery where people can purchase decorative plants and trees and herbs. I looked for some basil, but it had already been sold out. Another day.

There are three buildings behind the main Farmer's Market area. One is where people can buy ready-made food - fried stuff and pulled pork type things, I believe. In the main building, there are vendors selling painting, crafts, candies, desserts (pies and cakes), parts of cows - I wish I had gotten a picture of the list - shanks and shoulders, butts and briskets. However, what brings me to this building every time is the vast selection of jams, jellies, preserves, sauces, dressings, and honey. Oh the honey. Clover, wildflower, with the comb, without the comb. It truly looks like nectar of the gods...

Also in the jam building are a few other selections, as can be seen below in example and on banners (fresh rabbit, anyone?). The cast iron items are huge and extremely heavy. Not sure who would want to get a loaf of bread out of an oven when the pan weighs as much as a 4-year-old child.



So far, the only things I have bought in the jam/honey area has been as gifts, so one of these days, I am going to stock up on some North Carolina preserves (think of a fruit and they jar it), sticky honey, and part of a cow.

The third "second level" building is a pork market.

I was wary entering here thinking I would come face to face with whole hogs hanging from hooks. (Alliteration is my friend!) Thankfully, all the whole hogs had sold by this point, or they are kind enough to house them behind the fridges. If you want anything that is from a pig - they are your people. Bacon, pork skin, loins, chops, and these, the closest thing to a whole pig they had...

It is a fun place to be whether you are looking to buy things or not. The vendors are kind and helpful both with what makes a good rutabaga and what produce is coming in and going out of season. All the food I have bought there has been top notch and perfectly ripened. In fact, one vendor even told Aaron and I when we went last summer to wait a day or two to eat a certain kind of peach because it needed to ripen a little more. They know what they are talking about and have oodles of proof to show and taste from.

For the curious who think if they visit they will miss out on the fresh Carolina food because there is no stove in the hotel room, fear not! There is a Farmer's Market restaurant across the street that serves food directly from the market. I have heard it is top notch. Or, if you are more interested in some seafood, how about the NC Seafood Restaurant?

Do you see why I want to live closer to the market? Fresh picked strawberries and seafood could quickly become a nightly dinner if I lived close.

It's a Miracle (Fruit)!

Just a quick little note/link today...still failing to find the balance between things I want to post on versus my post-work desire to vegetate or run errands. Vegetation is winning.

In one of my food blogs today, there was a link to a New York Times article about a berry called Miracle Fruit. Apparently eating the pulp of this cranberry-looking berry changes sour tastes to sweet tastes for about an hour. Thus, sugary things taste even more sugary and sour things taste like sugar. Like the setting of the article, I too think this would make for an awesome gathering of people, especially if it were people who were not that familiar with one another. Everyone experiencing something new tends to bond. And who doesn't want to pour Tabasco down your throat and feel what hot icing is like? Even though the berries are about $2 each, for an hour of altered food tasting is worth it, I think. It is like a drug trip for your taste buds!

Twisted and Oh So Good..

It was a slow and lazy Saturday afternoon about a month ago. I was relaxing on the couch, enjoying the offerings of full cable, watching Bobby Flay on "Throwdown." For those not in the know, Throwdown is a show wherein Flay is given an assignment to try and beat another chef/restaurateur at what they make best - hot dogs, cakes, Texas Chili, etc. On this particular show, Flay was challenged to make a better pretzel and dipping sauce that a place in Philly. Raise your hands if you knew Philly was known for its pretzels? Me either, but apparently this is the case. Bobby pulled of a surprise win and it got me thinking about my own pretzel-making experiences...

The first recollection of the pretzel creative process came my senior year in college with roomie Lisa and friend Brannen/on/an (I cannot remember how he spelled his name). I do not remember much more than me being the worst twister of the bunch. My ends would not stay together, my logs were too thin, the complications were numerous.

Next memory also has a little Lisa in it. At her wedding, her favors were cookie cutters tied to a little recipe book that had some of her and hubby's favorite foods (oatmeal cookies, possum and egg noodles some of the highlights). One of them was her recipe for pretzels. Now that I had a year or two of age on me, I thought I was mature enough to manage the twisting. Which I did (with Aaron's help) quite wonderfully. However, in the printing of the recipe, a critical step was left off. There was not baking the pretzels, so it was assumed by Aaron and I that after the dough was boiled, they were ready to eat. They were not. We tried boiling them longer, which made them more wet and spongy. Then we tried baking them but the damage had already been done. I later emailed Lisa and got the missing step, but always was a little leery that she had left another step off in a ploy to corner the market on her pretzels. Moral of the story, don't trust a Midwesterner with curly hair. (I love you, Lisa!)

Back to the Saturday...

Emboldened with a courage that can only come from a lack of anything else to do, I began looking for Lisa's pretzel recipe so I could make a batch. But wait...why make Lisa's when I could see if Bobby's was so good as to merit a Throwdown win? I checked out the recipe online and was happy to see I had all the needed ingredients, so to pretzel making I went. It is fairly simple to make...a lot like pizza dough. In fact, I bet it would make good pizza dough...or focaccia, mmm focaccia.

After letting the dough rise, it was time to test my twisting abilities. I did pretty well overall, with two or three casualties post-boiling that became cinnamon sugar pretzels. The boiling is where I veered from the recipe slightly. I used less baking soda in the water because I was almost out, and I did not see any adverse issues. I do not think the pretzels would have faired as well were it not for my use of a spider, which allowed me to remove the pretzels without breaking them. Popped them in the oven, waited patiently and look what came out...


Seriously. I mean, come on. You cannot get that at Auntie Anne's. The outside has a great crust, but not rubbery or dry (even after microwaving to reheat), the inside is dense, airy, salty with a little hint of sweetness. I wanted to eat them all.

And, if that were not enough, I had leftover cheese from an enchilada dinner so I made a version of the Queso Poblano sauce using chili powder and cayenne pepper instead of the poblano. I think it worked well - gave the sauce a nice orange hue, played well off the salty and hint of sweet of the pretzel. No wonder Bobby won this Throwdown. And, because the cinnamon sugar ones needed some dipping love, I made a quick glaze with powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla extract - yummy!

Since that Saturday, I have made another batch or two, each as successful as the first. Even though the recipe makes 8, I was did make 12 once, but that was pushing it. The less dough you use, the thinner the pretzel, and who wants a skinny pretzel? In addition, the thinner pretzels make it a little harder in the boiling - more apt to come apart during and after boiling (think getting penne out of water with a spoon vs. getting spaghetti out).

When Aaron tasted one, he exclaimed, "This is by far the best thing you have made since you moved here." (So maybe that was not word-for-word what he said, but it is the general tone and feeling he emoted.) And, I would have to agree. The question now is: who would win in a Bobby's pretzel throwdown -me or Bobby?

Ice cream minus cream

I have an ongoing list of things I want to post about, but now that I have a job (yippee!) I no longer have 8+ hours in the day to blog at my leisure. So, until I get to those planned posts, I will write about a dessert you can buy ready-made at any grocery store - Haagen-Dazs!

I was read on Serious Eats about low-calorie ice cream (not for the low-cal part so much as the ice cream part) and saw Haagen-Dazs makes a chocolate sorbet, dairy-free frozen dessert. Generally speaking, I am not a gigantic fan of chocolate ice cream, but this is not chocolate ice cream, is it? It is sorbet, which means no dairy, which in turn means my tummy should like it more (silly lactose intolerance). But the only sorbets I have seen previous have been fruit-flavored, which is fine, but sometimes a person needs a pint of chocolate frozen goodness.

Cut to a few weeks later and Aaron and I decide to make burgers. At the grocery store, we gather all the needed items and make our way to the checkout. I cleverly veer toward the ice cream section "just to see" if the sorbet was there. Approximately 10 seconds later, I had my chocolate sorbet and Aaron had his pomegranate chip.

Burgers were great and it was time for dessert; the moment of truth. Will it taste like a watery, fake chocolate or like ice cream? Verdict: I don't need no stinkin' cream to have my chocolate frozen dessert. The texture is smooth, creamy (yeah, I don't know how they pull it off, either) with a great chocolate flavor. The chocolate does not taste sweet or syrupy, but a deep, rich flavor permeates the mouth. So now I have a great alternative to a "special" ice cream to get from time to time, and Haagen-Dazs continues to impress me with its flavors. (See also: Sticky Toffee Pudding and Mayan Chocolate)

And, for the curious, Pomegranate Chip is also a phenomenal ice cream - sweet, tart, a little bitter - mighty tasty.

My First Souffle

After I moved here and unpacked my belongings, I needed to test my kitchen out. See if the oven worked, figure out where would be best to do my cooking prep, and get used to the new locations of the fridge, knife drawer, and pantry. What better way to do this than to try and make a type of food never before attempted by me - souffle!

Watching people on TV make souffle, I thought it was going to be a disaster. Egg whites, an oven I am not accustomed to, all those stories of souffles falling. I chose to make Gritty Souffle (found in Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food: food x mixing + heat = baking) because I like Alton and his recipes, I got the cookbook for Christmas, and I had all the ingredients. The last reason is usually is the deciding factor. Some days, I will go to allrecipes.com and use their ingredient search in hopes of finding something I can make using, say, garlic, eggs, dried fruit, spinach, and bittersweet chocolate. Some days it is success, some days I go without. Hopefully the list I made would have resulted in a "without" day - garlic and chocolate? Not so much.

Back to the souffle. It is grits, but in a souffle. Or, if you want to make it sound a little more "high class" polenta souffle. It's French, it's Italian - it's Fritalian! The preparation of the souffle is close to Alton's recipe for Cheesy Souffle, but not quite. After making the grits, I was faced with a recipe step I was unfamiliar with - making egg foam (meringue, more or less). And, even though I added the cream of tartar with the egg whites at the beginning, and not after they got a little foamy, everything worked out just fine and fluffy egg whites were achieved.

Next most difficult task - folding the egg whites into the grits. It is important here to not stir, but fold, so that the egg foam does not deflate. I am not sure there is any way of knowing if I did this well or not until the souffle comes out of the oven and it is either a fluffy poof or a pancake. Waiting 45 minutes to find out was nerve-wracking. And, even after 45 minutes, the souffle could have fallen.

Thankfully, it did not and it turned out spectacular. Something it looks like was super hard. But it wasn't, it was rather simple.

It tasted pretty good, too. The garlic flavor really came out, and the garlic I used was not the best I have gotten and I used too much. I also did not have cheddar cheese (I cannot recall what cheese I used), so that would have better balanced the flavors. The best part of the whole thing is getting an "edge" piece because it has Parmesan cheese baked onto it (that is what Alton coated the sides with). Salty, crunchy, buttery, with airy souffle.

Enchilada de Pollo

Eating at Mexican restaurants growing up, I recall having an extremely limited list of options of what I wanted to eat on the menu. At first, it was only nachos, especially those from El Matador. Then, I began to branch out into quesadillas and cheese enchiladas. I know, I am such a thrill seeker. My ability to try different Tex Mex foods has grown since then, but my ability to make Mexican is relegated to making nachos, tacos, and Mexican salad. Until last weekend when my first attempt at enchiladas was tried.


Overall, it was a good meal (one I am still eating leftovers from). But, I do not think I will use the exact same recipe again. I had hopes, but Rachael Ray and her recipe went awry somewhere. Cooking the chicken in the broth with oregano and onions was great. I had never really known how to cook chicken other than cut it up in chunks and cook it in a skillet. I know, I know, shocking. But true. It used to be cooking it on the George Foreman, which resulted in dry, weirdly crusted chicken. So, stovetop chicken chunks is a step up.

Back to the meal. Where the recipe is off is in the sauce. It was too sweet. It had decent back of the throat heat, but the front flavor was like eating sugary tomato sauce. And the chicken stuffing needed some more juice or sauce or some cheese in it. It came out a little dry. But the clear main detractor was the sauce.


There were some adjustments I had to make to the recipe because I could not find hot cayenne pepper sauce. Maybe it does not exist at the grocery store here; maybe I was looking in the wrong place; maybe it goes by some brand name I am unaware of. And, yes, if one of you comments that hot cayenne pepper sauce is more commonly known as Tabasco or something, I will feel foolish. But it would not be first or the last time for that to occur.

The best part of the enchiladas was the cheese. While Aaron was getting his sandwich meats and cheeses at the grocery store, I investigated the cheese display for some Monterey jack cheese. I narrowed it down to four options. We decided that since I am still a little leery of really spicy things, to go with a mild-looking Monterey jack and a salsa jack cheese. The Monterey was so-so, but the Salsa Jack was great. Aaron and I ate dinner talking about where else we could use the cheese - queso, tacos, fried cheese sticks, eggs. And, since I want all of you to run out and buy a round, here is all the info you need about this cheese. It is the Salsa Jack Cheese, produced by Great Midwest. They have other variations on the same theme - habanero jack (I was to chicken for that one), smokey jack, etc.

And for dessert...s'mores. It has nothing to do with Tex Mex or enchiladas, but I wanted s'mores, so I got 'em. And so did Aaron, who contemplated their strata before eating.

Friday Night Pie

Aaron wanted pie. Not just any pie, apple pie. And so began each of our first endeavors into making a pie. What fun it was!

First, and most importantly - making the ice cream to go with the pie. What self-respecting apple pie does not demand homemade vanilla ice cream? This was a simple process because ice cream making is simple and I had made this recipe before. However, I have never properly made this recipe, ingredient for ingredient. The first time I made it, I could only find apricot preserves. And this time, I already had some orange marmalade, so I used that. I think it is used for for a natural sweetness than anything else, but I could be wrong. I did not notice a huge change in the flavor, just little bits of orange zest here and there. Made the ice cream, let it freeze overnight. Hands smelled like vanilla, which is infinitely more welcomed than when they smell like minced garlic.

Oh! If you have a KitchenAid mixer, buy their ice cream maker attachment. It works incredibly well and will tempt you to make ice creams, sorbets, gelatos, frozen yogurts, and sherbets throughout the year.

Pie day! First was to the grocery store to pick up apples and other needed supplies. The recipe did not say what kind of apple to use, so we opted for Fuji. I am not an apple eater, so I was lost when it came to this. I like Granny Smith for my Apple Dumplings, but someone *cough Aaron cough* does not like them.

Upon reaching my place, the first order of business was to make the pie dough. I have heard horror stories about pie dough, so I was nervous going into it. Pie dough is so easy! The main thing is to make sure everything is cold - shortening, butter, water. Into the fridge the two balls of dough went to chill, and onto apple cutting we went. Coring, peeling, and slicing.

The most difficult part was rolling the dough out. I am not the best roller, so things got a little uneven. But they worked and the pie tin was covered and in went the apple mixture. We got too many apples, so our pie was well filled. Now came the lattice. Have I mentioned that I am also not a great precision cutter? Yeah, Aaron should have done that part. I may have tried to claim the uneven cutting made it look for rustic, but I think that was like calling a scorched steak "blackened." But I rocked the latticing!

The edges were trimmed and into the oven it went along with those tasty pie dough scraps. Which is where the trouble started. Being new to my oven, we had not worked out all the kinks of our relationship, gotten to know each other well. So, I think when I tried to set the timer, I set the oven timer, which apparently lets you set how long to keep your oven on. And, since I had set it for 10 minutes in order to get the dough scraps out, the pie warmed, but did not bake, for 35 of its 45 minutes in the oven. Oops.

At 45 minutes, seeing that the pie and the dough were still rather raw, I saw the error of my ways and turned the oven back on and baked the pie a little longer. However, the dough was still not done and the apples were still very firm, so it baked some more. Meanwhile, Aaron and I were watching a movie. And, at some point, an odor arose - a burnt odor. Quickly moving to the kitchen this is the sight that we were met with...

uh oh... I checked the pie, and it was fine, but the dough scraps, oh the dough scraps. Burnt. Not singed, not well-toasted. Charred black burnt. Crumble to soot in your hands burnt. And my apartment was filling with smoke. Having had a smoke-filled apartment before (my blog is not called "Where there's smoke" after all) windows and doors were opened, fans were turned on, and a waving of dish towels commenced. Thankfully, the fire alarm did not go off, just a few neighbors wondering why the new girl was burning down their building. The smoke dissipated, the smell still lingers today.

But what about the pie? Did it suffer and adverse effects? Judge for yourself...

I think that is the most beautiful apple pie I have ever seen. But, pies are not enjoyed based on their beauty. It is all about the taste. Well, I think we should have gone with a different apple. The Fujis let out a lot of juice, which made the bottom of the pie a little mushy. We also should have cut them thinner and smaller since sometimes a forkful yielded a chunk of apple that would be inappropriate to shove in your mouth among others. I also think the apples were too sweet - it lacked a slight tartness that maybe a Granny Smith or two would bring. The top of the pie crust was phenomenal, and the slight taste of lemon juice cutting through the sweet was excellent. And with some homemade ice cream, it was a Friday night to enjoy.