The delectable French Quarter.

That's right, nearly nine months later, I bring you a sample of my tasty explorations of New Orleans. A little overdue, but well timed since the posts have begun to dwindle.

First off, we have the most delicious sampler I've ever had. It consisted of four regional dishes, 1. Gumbo 2. Jambalaya 3. Something with shrimp and rice and 4. Something with Red Beans... I wrote down their names, but I don't remember where because it was nine months ago. I DO remember that it was accompanied by some delicious fried and battered alligator (think: chicken strips but more exciting).

Next up was my first foray into the world of Oysters. My conclusion was that Oyster sauce = delicious, Oysters themselves = slimy. . My companion ordered turtle soup, and although I'm glad to have had the experience, the soup did not taste much different than spicy grass. Interesting yes, delicious? I think not.

I wish I had taken pictures of the world famous New Orleans Beniget. So fried and powdered and amazing.

That's my day in the French Quarter in a nutshell. Hope it titillated your tastebuds a satisfactory amount!

More Boring Day Projects

My most recent forays into the food world, as I impatiently await the start of my Obama gig and hopefully another paying deal...
Banana-flax seed bread.

Caribbean Sweet Potato Gratin

This thing was seriously an amazing flavor explosion--it has lime, cilantro, coconut milk, spinach, black beans, rice, sweet potatoes--a random medley, but a great one. There's also a great thyme-cornmeal crust baked on top. I only had orzo on hand so next time I think I'll use wild or brown rice, or maybe even arborio to get some added creaminess. This tasted great but didn't hold together as well as I'd hoped.

Karina invited me over for tabouleh and told me to make anything I wanted to go with it. I had three cans of beans on hand and some cilantro, so this dip-salad-thing happened. Pintos, kidneys, garbanzos, cilantro, bell pepper, tomatoes, cumin, thyme, and ground up yellow corn chips.

Ah, the makings for some great tabouleh.

It actually turned out massively delish, and we toasted some pita in the oven to go along with it. In the cute new condo. And we had wine. We are adorable.

Learning to Jerk the Beef

I want to preface all of this by saying that any sexual-seeming innuendo herein should be taken at the most literal level possible. Because this entry really is about Blake showing me how to jerk beef.

First we made the marinades. His was sweet spicy garlic and involved quite a bit of brown sugar. Mine was Thai-Style with peanut sauce and hella ginger, sort of satay-inspired.

We let it marinate overnight then dried it in the morning and the results were spectacular. Blake's was a little too sweet for my taste, it kind of masked the beef. I like when you taste the purest beef flavor, it smelled so good when we were cutting it. Yeah, I realized I like the smell of raw beef. Does this make me sick? I'm such a carnivore.

It was pretty wonderful. My dog ate a bag of it. Next time, wine marinades, more oven time, and higher quality beef--daria and i plan to try flank.

-Linni, Oak Park IL

Mother's Day Brunch

I think it'd be pretty sweet to be the mother of a someone who likes to cook, because any holiday from flag day to christmas to mother's day is an excuse to make something delicious.
Some spinach, getting ready to be added to eggs and feta for a frittata, and some peaches getting ready for the pancake

The dutch baby, sittin pretty in the oven

A closer look...

Voila! Dutch Apple Pancake with Spiced Fruit and Greek Yogurt--yummo.

-Linni, Oak Park IL

Glazes, and Frostings, and Cakes- Oh My!

Fat Pack Member Taylor Feldman- newest of them all- broke in her right to bake as a year older by baking seventeen cakes for her seventeenth birthday.


Appropriate?



A generous portion more than not.


However, only a few Fat Pack members were there to actually experience them, so here the images remain for your viewing pleasure.





<--A traditional yellow Barbie cake.. as expected. Chocolate Bundt with Mountain Cream Frosting and Parlor Pecans.








Mini Red Velvet Bundt Cakes with White
Frosting and Bubble Sprinkles

Angel Food with Lemon Glaze and garnished with Lemon Zest




Texas Sheath Cake with Chocolate Pecan Frosting





<--Four Layer German Chocolate with Honey Almond Frosting and Toasted Coconut Three

Layer Carrot Cake with Whipped Cream Cheese and Walnut Frosting and much, much more

Wish you all were there to share! More cakes to come in the future
With Love and Adoration,
Fat-T :)

THIS JUST IN

I ATE THIS TOO FAST TO TAKE PICTURES OF IT

you know my hot jam, peanut butter, banana, and honey on wheat toast?

Today, I put peanut butter, banana, and honey on a wheat WRAP. so essentially, a burrito.

Then, as if that wasn't good enough, I grilled it on the good old george foreman lean mean fat-reducing machine.

Next time, I may put some mushy cooked cinnamon apples on a warm wrap, or some berries and cream cheese? a whole new era of breakfast burrito has arrived.

-Linni
LA, CA

How We Do 4-20

I made dinner tonight.
Ashley had been wanting scalloped potatoes, so we did those. I also tossed together a spinach chicken salad with a whole hodge podge of veggies from the MP and dried cranberries and apples.

I also made these little individual pizzas that are sposed to be made on boboli crust, but i bought this middle eastern doughey amazing stuff from TJ's. it has sweet cream cheese and apples cooked with cinnamon, sugar, butter--all that good stuff.

Yesterday, I made Oreo Cookie Magic cupcakes for Megan to mimic her favorite 21 choices flavor, which has cookie dough, sprinkles, and oreos. I put a ball of cookie dough in each vanilla cupcake and made oreo sprinkle frosting and voila--oreo cookie magic! I made them with the kitchen blocked off so she wouldn't see, but Campo thought we were making pot brownies for sure.

More April Mish-Mash

please please PLEASE click on these to see the bigger pictures. they're great, but i didn't want to make this huge.


my sister took out a dinner roll, put a square of colby jack inside of it, and stuck it in the microwave. like it was no big deal. it was a big deal. we also made oreo pudding pie with oreos on top that i dipped in bailey's shots. wowie wow wow.


my dad made shrimp cocktail. he's adorable sometimes.

Ah, Spitz. Spitz was started by a guy who graduated from Oxy in 05--he went abroad and fell in love with doner kebab, couldn't understand how there were 4 shops on each block there and none here. So he, Bryce, adorable sweet guy, opened Spitz the summer he graduated. Now it's this huge deal, it won citysearch's best top 10 fast food places in LA, and tons of other awards already. They're opening a new store and bryce wants to franchise it. They serve sweet potato fries, falafel sandwiches, doner, gelato, amazing amazing stuff.

Pan-roasted Australian Sea Bass [Baramundi] with creamed baby spinach, truffled squash, and verjus meuniere from Bistro 45. What that last word means, I have no clue, but I am currently on kind of a sea bass kick so yay yay yay.

linni, ca

An April Holiday Hodge Podge

So I was sick of looking at that MONTH OLD post about my cake. Seriously, if I clicked the link on my bookmark bar labeled fat pack and read the headline "clementine's first dance" one more time, i would have probably gone absolutley bizonkers and burned this place to the ground.

I was hoping to wait so someone else would post and I wouldn't be every other one, but whatever. I am gonna do a buncha posts with random collections of the food I've eaten over the past month. Yes, I've been holding out. I've been busy, but I finally had 15 minutes free and thought this would be a good use of my time.

There are a lotta pictures so i made them small, but as always, you can and should click on them to get the larger, detailed, mouth-watering image.

This was the AMAZING torta that Megan's mom made us for Easter brunch in Santa Ana. It had zucchini, squash, bread crumbs, gruyere, so many delicious things i don't even remember, grilled bell peppers...yummm

The spread--fruit salad, always better in CA, not to be a huge brat--broccoli spinach pie with wheat crust and chicken sausage that i could. not. stop. eating. Pumpkin pecan upside down cake and my contribution to the event--walnut bread with honey lemon glaze. Soooo moist.

This was the almond cake we had. It had almond extract in the cake, almond paste in the filling, and a cheesecake frosting dusted with--what else?--sliced almonds.

And finally, for Passover, we made matzo pizzas. This is seriously the easiest dinner you can make yourself--you put tomato sauce and cheese on it and whatever spices and veggies you want, nuke it for a minute, and voila! delicious. we also made dessert pizzas with this globular mix of cream cheese, brown sugar, and vanilla, which was amazing nuked or not.


Linni, CA

Clementine's First Dance

I got a Kitchenaid for my birthday.
So I decided to make a plain and simple yellow cake with chocolate frosting.
And because simple has never been my strong suit, I toasted some pecan chips and coconut flakes, mixed it with crunched up samoa girl scout cookies, and put that mixture between the layers and on top.

Voila! A glorious popping of my Kitchenaid cherry.

-Linni
Oak Park, IL

SB2K7: What I Made This Week

So, I cooked a lot over Spring Break. Here are some highlights--click on the pictures to see bigger versions, some of these are sort of small.

We grilled in Blake's backyard--blue cheese burgers from his northern butcher shop genius. They were out of this world, especially when served with Jack Daniel's mustard, which Daria and I ate by itself long after the burgers were gone. At this same barbecue, I decided to put bananas on top of cinnamon graham crackers with a burnt marshmallow in the middle. Daria said it tasted like banana bread. I made about 10 of those.

These are the grapefruit sandwich cookies I made. They are grapefruit sugar cookies with a grapefruit buttercream filling. I hope to one day make a cake using this model--a basic citrus cake, like a lemon cake recipe, but with grapefruit. and i can use the same buttercream from the cookies, cept maybe with a little cream cheese thrown in.

I had a lot of buttercream leftover, so I made a batch of digestive biscuits and put it on those.

I made truffled red wine risotto and stirred in some golden raisins and sunflower seeds!!!

contrary to popular belief, risotto is super fun to make and not actually a huge pain in the ass.

Nessa and I had leftovers at the Feldman house one night, and the dessert was skim ricotta with vanilla bean and splenda and berries. a texture like you wouldn't believe.

-Linni
Oak Park, IL

A Brief Return to Oak Park

So for my first breakfast at home, I made this cute little thing you see below. It involved a vegan sausage patty, which left behind some delicious juices for me to cook my two egg whites in. The gala apple slices had some sunflower butter [peanut butter made with sunflower seeds instead of peanuts] for dipping, there was skim milk, and i watched Weeds while I ate it to complete the experience.

However, that was far from the most exciting thing I ate today. Check my other blog for details [picospalate.blogspot.com]

-Linni
Oak Park, IL

p.s. i also made chocolate chip banana bundt cake that is literally the most irresistible form of banana bread ive ever made. i am having trouble keeping myself from eating it.

In delicious of the cherimoya, ripening is definite factor

At the Hollywood Farmer's Market last weekend, my friend Richie from the newspaper turned to me and said "Well Miss Food Critic, have you ever tried a cherimoya?
A cheri-whata?
I recognize a challenge when i hear one. So i bought it for 50 cents and brought it home to ripen.

You aren't supposed to eat it til it's soft.

On the third day, I sized it up...

Cut it open...

and it was kind of a delicious mess. A mixture of a pineapple, pear, and banana in flavor. Sposed to be eaten with a spoon, but i just kind of went at it with my mouth. I think it'd be good in a juice or smoothie. The end!
-Linni

Hey fatty fat, why don't you eat more fatty fat.......

Ok.


Ordered 30 wings, but only ate 24 wings from Buffalo Wild Wings. Chickens have 2 wings, I ate 12 chicken's arms.
-Mild
-Sweet BBQ
-Mango Habenero
-Spicy Garlic
-Blazin'



THEN

I ordered some type of fried potato covered in cheese.









-DeKalb fat, DeKalb IL

Valdeefy-Weefs Meets the OC

eric came to california. and we went to jessica's house, with a real kitchen. so we made a lotta food.

i made ginger salmon burgers.
eric made tobasco burgers, blue cheese burgers, chipotle burgers, and garlic burgers. i ate a lot of the blue cheese ones. we served all the burgers on sourdough rolls with this ginger mayo i made. there was also lemon pasta and a salad of baby greens with pecans, blue cheese, and apples.

my zucchini cake project--many ingredients were missing, and i plan to do it again with many changes--but for the record, dana and eric said it didn't need any.

this breakfast started with the farro grain bread jess's dad bought me at il farro, aka the best italian food i've ever had. it's made with this grain that is not only super good for you, it also tastes unlike any other bread you've ever had. hearty and thick and ever so slightly sweet, yet is low-carb, low-gluten and packed with b vitamins. so i made orange-cinnamon-clove french toast with it.

i know these look weird and gross but they are super easy and deliriously addictive. they're just mini marshmallows and brazil nuts or kona-coffee flavored macadamia nuts, just a wee bit smothered in chocolate. seriously way addictive.

eric's sweet combo of OJ and POM lychee green tea.

-Linni, and also Elk Warrior by proxy
Orange County, CA