Successful Cooking Experiments!

Eben has been working really hard finishing his thesis, which means working through the weekend as well. My way of helping is to cook lots of yummy foods. Last Sunday I really wanted to do some baking. I knew I wanted to do something chocolate and I'd never made a multilayer cake, so the answer seemed quite simple.

I cut the parchment paper for the pans which proved challenging at first (left pan), then I figured it out (right). I felt pretty good going into the baking since I was able to figure out my first challenge. Although I was thinking that if this pattern continued, I would end up with one great layer and one layer sub par.

The batter was VERY runny, which worried me. Also note the light dusting of cocoa powder on pretty much everything. I am not a neat or clean baker!

Before the oven.

After the oven. All was going quite smoothly!

Once the cakes were cool it was time for frosting! What goes better with chocolate cake then chocolate frosting? If you ask me, nothing!

Again I was very nervous, this time about moving the layers, but this went off without a hitch too!

I didn't have any nerves about frosting the cake, that's just fun.

With the cake successfully complete (I DID IT!), it was time to make dinner. Since Sunday was a day of firsts, I wanted to try cooking shrimp. Shrimp has always been something I get only when I dine out, but I wanted to master it at home too. Eben doesn't eat shrimp so I went all out and made coconut curry shrimp (he doesn't like coconut either)!

Despite the fish man telling me that the shrimp were de-veined and peeled, the smaller under 'vein' was still there, so I had to remove that because who (besides Mobi) wants to eat poo?

I sauteed the onion, ginger, garlic, and curry paste.

Once all the rest was soft, in went the shrimp. I LOVE that the heat causes the proteins in the shrimp to turn from clear/grey to coral! Science is cool.

Stirred in the coconut milk and added some scallions and plopped it on some brown rice. Sugar snap peas seemed an appropriate side. It was really good! *pats self on back*

Eben had the ginger and pinko encrusted wild salmon that I made the night before with some brown rice and a green pepper.

I called a bunch of friends throughout the day inviting them over for cake, but since no one was in town, I had no takers. Seems sad really; to bake a cake and have no one to eat it.... as a small consolation they all were pretty disappointed that they weren't around. After having dinner, Eben allowed himself a cake break.

We packed up two slices and some milk and went to the park near our house.

After a long day in the kitchen, it was a treat to get outside and actually spend some time together without Eben's computer lurking in the next room. We played one game of cribbage (which Eben won with some pretty amazing hands! Not one of his hands was worth less than 6!). A tasty break if I do say so myself!

Summer of Veggies

This summer Eben and I decided to join a farm. We didn't actually do any work or even get our hands dirty (much to my dismay), but we have been sharing in the bounty of the farm. Towards the end of winter this past year, I was chatting with one of my clients at the spa about local produce and area farms. She told me about a friend of her's who bought his first farm in western Mass and was planning to offer farm shares.

Here's our farm in April before any planting started outside.

The way the shares work, if you're unfamiliar with CSA (community assisted agriculture), is to buy a full or half share and to then get fresh local produce for a set number of weeks. It's great for so many reasons! You, as the share holder, provide the farm with the capital it needs to begin the growing season, the farm has an already established customer base for their harvests, you know exactly where and from whom you're vegetables come, and best of all for me, you get to learn about the seasonality and types of vegetables available in your region.

I love going each week, not knowing what I'll get, then having to sort out what to do with all the veggies. Each week they do a 'drop' in Cambridge, so we go after work and pick up our vegetables. At our farm, Stone Soup Farm, we get veggies for 22 weeks. Since one full share includes anywhere from 10 to 15lbs of different veggies (that's what they say, but it's definitely more) and sometimes herbs and fruit, we decided to share our share with a couple of friends. Two of my coworkers at the spa wanted in, so Mindy and her son Aidan, Fiona and her husband Chris, and Eben and I have been sharing our full share all summer. The farm offers a sliding scale for payment. One full share costs $450 to produce, so that's what we opted to pay, which translates to $150 each for 22 weeks of organic veggies!!!! In addition to our veggies, I also got a flower share, so each week I also get a beautiful bouquet of flowers.

An early week with lots of greens (various types of kale), onions, fennel, basil, eggplant, summer squash, and zucchini (no flowers yet).

Later in the summer with peppers, scallions, carrots, cucumbers, rosemary, potatoes, chard, green beans and some lovely flowers!

I've been doing lots of cooking with our veggies. Here are a couple of examples:

Tofu ratatouille in the process of cooking (in my Le Creuset to stick with the French theme).

After roasting for about an hour. YUM, it was super delicious!

This week had lots of random stuff, so I did some chopping and opted for a stirfry.

Onions, garlic, fennel, eggplant, and both squash sauteed with lemon.

Next I sauteed the kale and raw corn. In the end, I just mixed it all together with some fresh basil and served it over cous cous. I was pretty impressed because I had no idea how these flavors would combine (never used fennel before) and it was yummy! The sweet corn really added a neat flavor to more traditional stir fry items.

I am a huge supporter of eating local organic produce!!! Not only is the food healthier for the individual, but it's also much healthier for your environment because you don't have to worry about pesticides and poisons seeping into ground water, rivers, and lakes. Nor is there as high a concern of depleting the soil (as long as compost is utilized and crops are rotated). You help alleviate agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels in the form of shipping and fertilizers. You're not eating pesticide covered food, produced on another continent, harvested before it's ripe, covered in wax, flown across the world, and shipped in refrigerated trucks before it gets to your local stores. Using compost based fertilizers instead of fossil fuel derived N-P-K fertilizers provides plants all the essentials for growing nutrient rich foods. Although nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are essential for plant growth, those are not the only elements important, and thus 'conventional' veggies have lower nutritional values than their organic counterparts. If you're interested in learning about conventional, large scale organic, and local organic I recommend reading The Omnivores Dilemma. There's a lot of information out there. I'm really curious, what options are there in your area for local organic produce and grass fed meat and dairy?

After that rant, I'll leave you with some inhabitants of our farm...

CHICKENS!!!! (fluffy little bums!)

Summer Fruit Crostata!

We had a number of college and medical students interning at the the lab this summer. To thank them for their hard work, Bryan (my office mate) and I had a BBQ for them. My contribution was dessert.

Being summer, I opted for a fruit based crostata. The filling was peaches, black plums, and blue berries with fresh orange juice.

The crust, as any good crust, was made of mainly butter and flour.

It was yummy and the BBQ was fun!

An evening in the Common

Every summer Boston has free Shakespeare on the Common with a show each night for a couple of weeks. With all the evening rainstorms this summer, we weren't sure if we were going to get to go before the run ended. This year's play was 'As You Like It'.Neither of us had ever seen it performed, and I was excited they did a comedy because frankly, it's fun more to laugh than watch all the misery of the tragedies.

Each year the stage tends to appear simple, but they always do a great job making it work for the show. This one had the different tree pieces on tracks so that they could slide along the stage into different positions.

Our friends Sarah, Elisha, Eric and Fiona joined us for our picnic and the show.

We were supposed to go the night before, but it rained, so I baked some ginger cookies! I have snacking elves in my kitchen, I catch them every once in a while....

You can see the gooey ginger candies melting out of the cookies. I was very excited because these cookies actually stayed soft! Whenever I make cookies, I either mix them too much or bake them too long and they get crunchy.

The Ultimate Ginger Cookie recipe was from The Barefoot Contessa at Home. Although, instead of crystallized ginger, I used Indonesian ginger candies (there was a lot of unwrapping and they were so hard to cut up. Next time I'll get the correct ingredient).

Pearl

Meet Pearl Aniela Capolongo:She was born June 23rd and is pictured here with her lovely mother Chrystina. We met her just before she was 5 weeks. She is named for Chrystina's late mother's love of pearls, and her middle name is Italian for angel because with a last name like Capolongo, they felt it was important one of her other names also be Italian as well.

Here is Mario, her daddy, consoling her (turns out she was hungry and there was nothing the boys could do). Mario is one of Eben's oldest friends. They grew up playing together.
As you can see, she's is adorable! Despite being so young, she has very little interest in being swaddled. She likes to sleep sitting up in your arms so that she can constantly stretch her arms, leg, fingers, and toes.

Apparently she tired out the boys.

I will leave you with one of my favorite Pearl features; her nostrils, which are shaped like tiny hearts!!!

Such a pretty baby!