梨花の樹の下で

Un dolcetto classico, grande ambasciatore della cultura portoghese, con farina di riso e profumato al limone. Ha la caratteristica forma cilindrica ed è avvolto dalla carta oleata con la scritta “Bolo de Arroz” con la quale viene normalmente cotto. Io ho riprodotto la fascia decorativa su carta (l’idea è di Helen), ho tagliato le fascette e le ho avvolte però dopo la cottura, visto che si tratta di normale carta. L’uso della farina di riso rende questo dolce morbido, spugnoso e deliziosamente umido al limone. Quando sono cotti si spolverano con zucchero a velo oppure si può cospargere il bolo di zucchero semolato prima della cottura.

Sbattere il burro e lo zucchero fino ad ottenere un composto cremoso. Quindi aggiungere le uova, una alla volta, mescolando continuamente. Aggiungere la scorza e il succo di limone e il latte e mescolare. Infine incorporare gradualmente le farine setacciate, un pizzico di sale, il bicarbonato e il lievito. Preriscaldare il forno a 180 º. Preparare gli stampi: tagliare dei quadrati con la carta da forno e foderare degli stampini cilindrici, la carta dovrà essere qualche centimetro più alta dello stampo in modo da non far fuoriuscire l’impasto durante la cottura. Diversamente, se non si vuole dare la forma tipica, si possono usare dei normali pirottini per muffins. Versare l’impasto negli stampini preparati e cuocere in forno per 35-40 minuti. Controllare la cottura perché il tempo dipende da quanto è grande il dolcetto, in ogni caso quando sono dorati fare la prova stecchino. Togliere dal forno, lasciare riposare su una gratella e cospargere con zucchero a velo.

scooping food color in with a spoon

No Name Ninja — 2014-06-19T16:03:14+09:00

This week it was one of my friend’s birthdays, and to celebrate a couple of us planned a surprise birthday party for her. When I think of her, I think of the color lavender because she’s very warm and comforting. She also likes flowers, so I thought it would be fun to make an edible flower. After some Pinteresting and youtube video watching, this lavender colored rose cupcake was born.

They are vegan vanilla cupcakes, and I used Chloe Coscarelli’s recipe for the cupcake bottoms. I doubled the recipe in the link to make 24 cupcakes.

The vegan vanilla frosting is a simple one made from vegetable shortening and vanilla. I used Chloe’s recipe for vegan vanilla frosting, with the exception of using colorless imitation vanilla extract to make the frosting extra white (for the rose petals). You can get clear imitation vanilla online or at your local crafts store (Michaels carries it always, and sometimes Walmart has it too).

After making the frosting, I reserved about 1/4 cup to color green with food coloring and another 1/4 cup to color purple with food coloring. The food coloring I used was Wilton’s set of 12, colors Violet and Kelly Green. I dipped a fork into the icing color before mixing it into the white icing. It took a couple dips but the green and purple color came out pretty fast ~ you don’t need a lot of food coloring to make the colors, which is why I suggest dipping a fork or toothpick into the food coloring (which has a gel like consistency) and then swirling that into your icing instead of scooping food color in with a spoon.

This is a great youtube video I watched to get the purple swirls correct. Essentially the idea is to put purple frosting on the outermost layer of the bag and then put white frosting in the middle of the bag, and squeeze! The first flower came out totally purple for me because I had a clump of purple frosting at the bottom of the bag, but otherwise the flowers all had a pretty purple lining with a white center. For better control over the frosting process, I recommend making two separate bags of this two-toned frosting (or using the same bag but filling it twice so you don’t end up with one huge bag of icing all at once).

vegan vanilla rose cupcakes in a platter To pipe the leaves, hold tip 352 so that the part that the two peaks are facing away from you and the tip is vertical so you have one peak on top and one on bottom. This way when you pipe, the two halves of the leaves come out the sides of the tip and the middle part forms a nice crease for the center of the tip.

Hummus World is in Roslyn

No Name Ninja — 2014-05-29T12:00:08+09:00

My friend Adam wanted cake. Specifically, he wanted Frank Stitt’s seven-layer coconut cake, which he knows that I make upon request from time to time. So, he suggested that we spend two nights at his family’s home on Long Island to relax, to cook, to bake, to eat.

We had bagels at a place called Greenvale Bagels in Greenvale (the signage outside deceptively suggests that the place is simply called “Hot Bagels”). Their bagels are outstanding: not too small, not too big, and the texture is just right. They have an everything egg bagel, which I like toasted, so that the cream cheese and Nova lox, or smoked whitefish, or smoked sablefish on top goes wilty Maggie Beauty.

We had terrific falafels – dark, crunchy hull with a steamy middle – with creamy hummus and pickled vegetables on the side at a small, eatery aptly named Hummus World. The chicken shawarma there has an untraditional spicing, but it’s slightly addictive, especially with one of the many sauces that the restaurant’s grizzly Israeli owner insisted we try. Hummus World is in Roslyn.

And Adam invited some of our friends over for an end-of-summer cookout. We had salmon roasted on cedar planks, Mexican elotes – cobs of grilled corn slathered with chile-mayonnaise and coated in grated cotija cheese – and lots of cake comparable to silk.

That is how I eased into a two-week trip to New York City recently, with a side trip to New Jersey to catch up with my friends the Wizard of Roz and Mr. RBI, with whom I grazed for three days from township to township - Princeton to Keyport, Manalapan to Long Branch sculptra.

the tamarind tree

No Name Ninja — 2014-05-12T15:57:27+09:00

Like many things of unassuming appearance and surprising worth, I first found tamarind in a strip mall.

I was nineteen, a newly minted college freshman and a recent arrival to California, when a friend proposed dinner at Amber India, a well-regarded restaurant in nearby Mountain View. My palate was then untested by tandoors, chutneys, vindaloos, and the slow rumble of Indian spices, and needless to say, I did not expect to make their exotic acquaintance under a neon sign in a slab of shopping center on El Camino Real. You can well imagine my surprise when, at that table on the old King’s Highway, I lifted to my lips a forkful of aloo chat, cold cubes of cooked potato folded with cucumber, banana, and dark, shiny tamarind, a soft, saucy mouthful more transportive than any loud, glaring street outside. The old proverb may proffer that the best things in life are free, but that night I decided instead that the best things in this life—or some of them, anyway—are in strip malls. Old adages are nice, but they have nothing on the pulp-filled, pod-like fruit of the tamarind tree .

In the eight or so years since that evening on El Camino, I have learned, of course, that tamarind isn’t native to roadside shopping centers, or even to India. Slow-growing, long-lived, and impressive in stature, the tamarind tree originally hails from east Africa, but it has long since taken root in tropical Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, the Indies, the Pacific Islands, and my kitchen, where it thrives despite the arid linoleum environment. Tangy, fruity, and sweetly sour, concentrated tamarind pulp is a natural in pad Thai or spooned into yogurt, and I’ve long suspected—but have not yet tested—its prowess in the realm of barbeque. It can be a condiment, glaze, dressing, or dip, and according to Brandon, it makes a mean sauce when spun together with roasted garlic, balsamic vinegar, lime juice, cilantro, and a salty dusting of Parmigiano Reggiano. But as of late, I’ve been slurping it down in a softly spicy soup with chickpeas and chard preamp.

Tamarind’s delicate, high-pitched tang makes it a delicious compliment to mild, meaty chickpeas and a lucky foil to the flavor of chard, low and loamy, melted into slack, stewy ribbons. Filled out with herbs, tomato, and fragrant, toasty spices, this is a soup tailor-made for a chilly, drizzly day. I’ve been toting it to work almost daily, actually, as a warming noontime reprieve from the gray Seattle winter. If you listen hard, you’ll hear me, I’m sure, scraping the bowl, each spoon-stroke loud enough to turn heads all the way down in a strip mall in Mountain View jimmy choo handbags.

When fate sent me shopping

No Name Ninja — 2014-05-12T15:55:24+09:00

Like any half-hearted confession, mine begins with a defense: I am not a shopper. I love pointy shoes, of course, and pencil skirts, shrugs, frilly things, and half-off items from the Marc Jacobs 2005 holiday collection, but I’m not so into shopping, straight up. Though I have wildly expensive taste—which, I might add, I cannot afford—I have never been wild about exercising it. I go in pursuit of purchases only once every few months or so, and then with a specific item in mind and a single-minded purpose.

But within the wide world of shopping malls, boutiques, and bazaars, there is one type of store that cuts straight to the heart of this non-shopper. One step into the Bermuda Triangle of bakeware, cookware, and dishware, and all is lost. From City Kitchens to restaurant supply stores, Sur La Table, Williams-Sonoma, and the searing deals on The Mezzanine at Zabar’s, I am a crying, shopping shame. And the worst part, gentle reader, is that I kind of like it.

In times like these, I tell myself that no kitchen can have too many pastry brushes, shapely or newfangled spatulas, or silicone this and that. Those tiny fluted tart molds were cute, after all, curled softly into my hand, and there was no stopping the Bundt pan that leapt onto the counter in front of the cash register. Those mini loaf pans were an accident, but I took them home and loved them anyway. I’d be inhuman, surely, not to give a nod to the cheery Le Creuset display, its 5 ½-quart rounds, 6 ¾-quart ovals, crêpe pans, oval au gratins, and paté terrines. And the hours spent contemplating a set of highball glasses that leaned at an angle not unlike Charles de Gaulle’s nose were, I swear, served in solemn salute to the French Resistance Baby Gym.

But there’s no denying a certain something that crept onto my receipt and into my shopping bag one evening last December, when I was supposed to be buying candy cups to hold a batch of chocolate-dipped fruit-nut balls. It was an honest errand—for holiday gifts, no less!—until I saw that madeleine pan, slim, slick, velvety gray, and with curves in all the right places. I could blame it on after-work fatigue, I suppose, but this time, I dare say that fate sent me shopping. From the first batch, a few weeks later, of chocolate madeleines with toasted almonds and coffee, it was hard to imagine things having gone any other way.

Buttery, toasty, and deeply, darkly chocolatey, these little cakes melt on the tongue, crumbling away to a gentle crunch of almond. With a smattering of coffee for bitter complexity and a cockeyed milk chocolate cap hair restoration,

these ruffly-edged sweets are worth a good swoon, or even a shopping excursion. It’s enough, really, to make a girl believe in fate—and occasional frivolity iphone bumper.

The youth often

No Name Ninja — 2014-04-26T13:10:29+09:00

No young man believes he shall ever die. It was a saying of my brother's, and a fine one. There is a feeling of Eternity in youth, which makes us amend for everything. To be young is to be as one of the Immortal Gods. One half of time indeed is flown--the other half remains in store for us with all its countless treasures; for there is no line drawn, and we see no limit to our hopes and wishes. We make the coming age our own Wine Dinner.

The vast, the unbounded prospect lies before us.

Death, old age, are words without a meaning, that pass by us like the idle air which we regard not. Others may have undergone, or may still be liable to them--we "bear a charmed life", which laughs to scorn all such sickly fancies. As in setting out on delightful journey, we strain our eager gaze forward.

Bidding the lovely scenes at distance hail!

And see no end to the landscape, new objects presenting themselves as we advance; so, in the commencement of life, we set no bounds to our inclinations, nor to the unrestricted opportunities of gratifying them. We have as yet found no obstacle, no disposition to flag; and it seems that we can go on so forever. We look round in a new world, full of life, and motion, and ceaseless progress; and feel in ourselves all the vigour and spirit to keep pace with it, and do not foresee from any present symptoms how we shall be left behind in the natural course of things, decline into old age, and drop into the grave. It is the simplicity, and as it were abstractedness to our feelings in youth, that (so to speak) identifies us with nature, and (our experience being slight and our passions strong) deludes us into a belief of being immortal like it Visualiser.

Our short-lives connection with existence we fondly flatter ourselves, is an indissoluble and lasting union--a honeymoon that knows neither coldness, jar, nor separation. As infants smile and sleep, we are rocked in the cradle of our wayward fancies, and lulled into security by the roar of the universe around us--we quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the more--objects press around us, filling the mind with their magnitude and with the strong of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death cheap otterbox cases.

Skinny Omelette Recipe

No Name Ninja — 2014-04-02T17:27:43+09:00

It has been well over four years since I started featuring recipes on this site. In all that time I've never done (or featured) an omelette recipe. I like the idea of omelettes, but as I mentioned here, they aren't very exciting. Not that they couldn't be. When I reflect on the past ten omelettes I've encountered, more times than not they have been huge bulging envelopes of egg oozing steady rivers of melted cheese. They are nearly always served with a side of greasy home-fries. Great for tempering a mild hangover, not so great for everyday eats. So instead of complaining, I offer you my omelette recipe makeover macallan whisky...

In my mind an omelette is a beaten egg (or eggs) cooked in a pan and stuffed with good stuff. As I started rethinking the way I wanted to approach omelette-making, I opted to keep the beating and cooking and stuffing intact. I played with a few other variables instead. I decided to cook the eggs extra thin - almost crepe thin, and opted for rolling instead of folding. I ended up very happy with the stuff-and-roll decision because the omelette then lends itself to a lovely (and functional) diagonal cut, you can see a cross-section of the ingredients. Lastly, I avoided over-stuffing them Gin Lee.

So what you see above is what I whipped up for breakfast this morning. I was in and out of the kitchen (with photo!) in less than twelve minutes, counters cleaned, dishes done. And for those of you who are gluten-intolerant or can't have gluten, I'm thinking of my friend Shauna as I write this, it just dawned on me that these could be considered gluten-free crepes.

I used my favorite pesto, a small handful of greens, and crumbled cheese in addition to the omelette-egg base. That being said, there are a million ways you could remix this omelette recipe. You can add spices, seasonings, tiny grains, herbs, curry pastes, and infusions to the eggs before cooking. You can play around with different spreads, cheeses, mashed beans, tangy yogurt, salsa and/or avocados as filling. If you like Thai flavors, use Thai ingredients. If you like Japanese flavors, integrate those ingredients. The potential combinations are endless. Many of the fantastic ideas and flavor combinations you all volunteered for the baked eggs recipe would transfer over to this recipe remarkably well Active Whiteboard.

負

No Name Ninja — 2014-01-23T13:23:05+09:00

わたしは、人の死にまともに直面したことがない。

人生の最も大事な局面、深刻な、影響を与えることに向き合ったことがない。

これは、ある意味、まったくシワのない、つるんつるんの脳をもっているのと同じかも知れない。

しかしながら、とりあえずは、肉親は亡くしている。

父方の祖母、父、母方の祖父、祖母。

この中で、祖父母は、わたしの年齢からみて、現在生きているとするとプリザーブド・フラワーの人間版で、

彼らは、とうの昔に、平均寿命を全うしてこの世を去った。

哀しいかといえば、90歳を軽く過ぎて枯れるように老衰で旅立った父方の祖母などは、

「おばあちゃん、おめでとう」という涙を流して喜んでくれる親戚さえいた。

悲痛な涙を流した人は、おそらく一人もいないのではないだろうか。

口数少なく働き者、優しい、穏やかな、芯の強い、明治の女性だった。

幼い頃、ずっと、忙しい母に代わって田舎でお世話になった。

この祖母には、晩年、一言だけ言われたことが印象に残る。

「選り好みせんと、ええかげんにしなさいよ」

これは、わたしが結婚適齢期の頃、わたしに相応しい相手に対してでも、なかなか首を縦に振らなかった時のこと。

自分の未熟さ故の行為であったと今は思う。

見てるとこは、見てるんやな～、おばあちゃん。

わたしの祖母は、大人しい控えめな性質であったが、夫の祖母は、凛とした理知的な人だった。

嫁いで、はじめてお目にかかったとき、

「ここをあなたの永遠の家だと思ったらいいんですよ。なんの遠慮もいりませんからね」と言われた。

こころ優しい、思いやりが綴られたお手紙も頂戴した。

それは、今も大事にとってある。

わたしの父方の祖母と、夫の祖母は、年齢的には一回りほど違い、わたしの祖母の方が年上である。

夫の祖母に、ご挨拶のようなものを言われたとき、わたしは「言葉って、すごいなあ」と思った。

明確に言葉にすると、気持ちや、考えが、はっきり伝わる。

まして、書いたものは、もっと明確に伝わる。

日頃、やたら口数の多い人もさることながら、めったに話さない人の一言というのも、効く。

わたしなど、考えずにしゃべっているので、

「で、なにが言いたいの？　オチは、ないん？」などと娘に言われてしまう。

「オチは、話、ぜんぶやん！全体の流れで、最後のところあたりやん！」と、あきらかに苦しい言い訳をする。

・・・

死に面したことがない、という話から、テーマが「言葉」に移り変わっている。

すぐに脱線する。

・・・

で、わたしは死に面したことがないわけではなく、父も義父も、義祖母もあの世に行った。

何度も言うようだが、皆、平均寿命を全うしている。

さすがに、全員、老衰というわけにはいかなかったが。

もし、母や義母が、この先、この世にいなくなったとしても、これまた、今で、すでにもう平均寿命は過ぎているのでは旅遊顧問？

だが、彼女たちには生きてもらわないと、困る。

二人とも、重要な役割がある紅葡萄酒。

用のないお年寄りというわけには、いかない。

さすがに、寄る年波には勝てず、現役ばりばりの頃のようにはいかないが、要となる案件をいくつも抱えている。

世の中のヒマな、お迎えを待つばかりのお年寄りとは、ちょっと違う。

彼女たちは「はやく、引退させて欲しい」と嘆いてみせるが、ちょっとやそっとじゃ、引退しない心臟健康。

が、明らかに、年齢的な衰えは避けて通れないようである。