“I was going to finish a post about granola bars.”
Aren’t you guys psyched you’re still reading this tumblr? I’ve got some really great content on deck here.
Cooking, eating, making sweeping pronouncements
Everyone loves the idea of turning a page while reading, but the reality is often very different: inconsistent paper quality, unhygienic saliva, and the frustration of inefficient turnover. The challenge: to find an easy, efficient means of turning a page while maintaining the classic reading experience. The solution: as it turned out, the secret to pleasurable page-turning lies in Swiss-milled oak-pulp paper - and a judicious application of gelatin.
Today my cookbook club created a novelty tumblr celebrating our inside joke about what if everything in life was described in the highly specific manner of a Cook’s Illustrated recipe headnote.
Submissions welcome.
This is everything that is great about the Internet. I was going to finish a post about granola bars but now I feel like I need to go work on a submission.
good:
This Vending Machine Serves Up Fresh-Squeezed Juice
- Adele Peters posted in Food, Health and JuiceStep aside, candy bars. LA’s newest vending machine—technically, a “juice ATM,” serves fresh juices 24/7. Like the Sprinkles Cupcake ATM, but quite a bit healthier.
L.A. is just the fucking worst. L.A. Is that friend from high school on Facebook who is constantly talking about how energized she feels during her juice cleanses and hot yoga and is so glad she’s above all that drama and you just have to get rid of people who are toxic and they know who they are.
God. I live in Maine. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve left the house in footwear that wasn’t snow boots in the last three months. I don’t need that juice vending machine shit. I have coffee and shoveling.
On a whim when I was pregnant I started sewing a quilt for my kiddo. I thought it was going to be a really simple baby blanket/mat, the kind you put on the floor for them to play on. I made little squares out of scraps of old fabric and odds and ends— an old button-down shirt of Dave’s, leftovers from a dress I made. And then as I was working on it it slowly got bigger and more elaborate. And I thought I would just tie it instead of quilting it, or at the very least machine quilt it, but that seemed not as nice so I hand-quilted it. And then because it was nicely hand-quilted, I decided to do the nicer hand-finished binding. In this way I have been working on the super simple baby quilt for months.
It’s almost done, though, and I’m really, really excited.
Life/Work Balance (ha!)
I didn’t post about this with my whole you-should-go-to-Bresca-for-lunch post, because I think it’s more about me than it is about Bresca or its chef/owner, but I keep thinking about the shift in Bresca’s hours (they reduced the number days they’re open for dinner to Friday and Saturday and added lunch service Wednesday through Saturday).
I love to eat out, but I eat out casually, so you can take this with however many grains of salt you want, but in my opinion Bresca’s chef, Krista Kern Desjarlais, is making some of the best food in Portland. You can see and taste the level of care in her food. And she has fancy accolades up the wazoo.
And when you eat at Bresca, you are eating food that she cooked. When I was there on Saturday, it was Desjarlais at the opposite counter putting together my desert. According to an interview with the Portland Press Herald, Desjarlais has been on the line in her kitchen every night that Bresca has been open.
It sure seems like working at that level as a chef must be incredibly intense work. And probably doesn’t leave a ton of room for a personal life, or a family. I imagine, if those are things that you prioritize, you don’t have a lot of good options as a chef. The work isn’t going to get less intense. You can’t really decide that dinner will end at 8 pm. And there are certain costs (like rent) that you pay whether you’re open two days or seven days. You can decide to delegate, but that’s another salary to pay, and I’ve certainly eaten at restaurants that have suffered as their chef phases back.
I can’t speak to Desjarlais’ motivations, and to think that her priorities are the same as mine would be unbelievably presumptuous. But I personally think about the challenges of balancing a family, or a non-work life, with my work life a fair amount.* I like my job, and I like doing my job well. But I also really like the other things I do, like this blog, and my sewing projects, and my relationship with Dave, and having a kid, and walking the dog. At some level, advancement in my career generally involves graduate school while working, and regular travel to conferences and meetings, and grant proposals in the evenings and on weekends. I want to keep my job, and I want to do my job well. And I ALSO don’t want to give up eating dinner with my family, or reading for pleasure, or those things that make me feel like a real and complete person outside of my work.
So what I think is really fantastic is seeing what looks a lot like a person working at a really high level in their career navigating how to make that career work with the rest of their life. And you better believe that I will go out of my way to support their businesses.
* I would also like to say that this is something that Dave also struggles with, and while it often gets labeled as a woman’s issue, I really strongly feel that it is a universal career issue.
Lunch at Bresca
I want to apologize to Krista Kern Desjarlais and the good folks at Bresca for my crappy iPhone photo of their magnificent burger.
It’s the best burger I’ve had in a long, long time. It has bacon and cheddar cheese and mayo and mustard and ketchup and the juices run down your hand and it’s just really, really fantastic.
I mean, they have other great stuff. When I went last Friday with Kate, she got the Brussels sprout salad, which was better than a Brussels sprout salad has any business being, and a soup that I didn’t try because I was too laser-focused on my burger at that point but that looked wonderful. And then I went again Saturday and got the Bresca “Madame” sandwich, their version of the croque madame, which involved a perfectly cooked egg, gruyere, and speck. And then I got a chocolate Napoleon for desert (see also: living your best life). I know lunch is not a meal that generally involves desert, but I just felt that if you have an opportunity to eat one of Desjarlais’ deserts, you have an obligation to take advantage of that opportunity. I regret nothing.
If you haven’t been, the restaurant is pretty and tiny, with warm brown walls, a chalkboard menu, fresh flowers, and a huge butcher block counter. The dishes are in the range of $12 (desert was $10).
And you should go. It’s a pretty fantastic way to eat at one of Portland’s best restaurants for very little money. They’re open Weds - Sat from 11:30 am to 2:30 pm (as well as dinner on Friday and Saturday).
Which means you can be eating this burger as soon as tomorrow.*
* If you live in Portland.
America's Test Kitchen: How Did Grapes Get So Fat?: Americans are into big food (hello, Super...
How Did Grapes Get So Fat?: Americans are into big food (hello, Super Size Me). But when we think of oversized portions, it’s usually fast food or large restaurant plates. Turns out that our fruit is also ballooning up, specifically grapes. Thompson seedless grapes are, when grown naturally,…
Grape girdles!
Willpower and Sleep Deprivation
My ability to make healthy decisions is just not worth shit when I haven’t slept.
Turns out the researchers were right. Huh.
(Relevant quote: “Studies show that the effects of sleep deprivation on your brain are equivalent to being a little bit drunk!”)
Eat Oatmeal or The Terrorists Win
I feel very strongly about oatmeal.
I was at a breastfeeding group a few weeks ago* and someone brought up steel cut oats** and not being sure how to cook them and not really liking them. I had a reaction akin to when a missionary knocks on a door and the person who answers says “you know, I HAVE felt spiritually unfulfilled lately…” So I started going into the multiple ways to cook them and how you can cook them the day of or the night before or even a big batch on the weekend and then microwave smaller portions or I’ve even heard of people using their slow cookers and I like the big-batch-then-microwave method and I just add some milk and then nuke it for a minute and then stir and then 30 seconds more and I can add chocolate chips and walnuts and banana or brown sugar and almonds and currants or raspberries and brown sugar and almonds and a bit of cream but really the possibilities are ENDLESS. And then I realized I had said too much and maybe the woman really just wanted some commiseration about the grossness of oatmeal anyway.
And then a day or two later a friend sent me a link to the above article and it really summed up everything I feel about oatmeal:
People who do not eat oatmeal belong on the “You Are What’s Wrong With Everything” list. This is America. And these are the rules. Don’t like them? Take your stuffed-brioche-french-toast ass back to Aix-en-Provençe (Proper pronunciation “Axe Un Province.”)
Also, it directs readers Flour Bakery in Boston, which you may recall as one of my favorite bakeries ever and the makers of my carrot cake wedding cake, which I order every time I go as a mini-celebration of my marriage and life in general.
* Hand to God, it is all I can do to not make this a breastfeeding tumblr at times. I strongly suspect that it is a topic more interesting to me than any of my followers, so I’ve been sparing you. But it’s basically every other day thatI think to myself “but it’s totally food-related!”
** Oatmeal is supposed to be a galactagogue, to increase your milk supply. Now you know.
Openers I shot for New York Magazine’s Best of New York Issue
This is the week that I just reblog shit, apparently. But look at the oysters! Guess who is stuffing her face with as much raw seafood and egg and cheese as possible now that she’s not pregnant? THIS LADY.
(via witanddelight)
