She: NC and food

We have pics from fabulous restaurants and all, but I thought I'd add a post on WHY we were in NC and the food along with it...we were there for a wedding. Mark was part of the wedding party--his best friend was getting married! Important foodie things: the rehersal dinner had an interesting cake based off the bride and groom hitting it off at a carwash. Then there was the dinner. I laughed at the southerness of it: fried chicken, green beans, hush puppies and bbq.

Now, I MUST protest this, much to Mark's annoyance. My family is from the bbq capital of the world...Kansas City. (thats right, I threw down that glove). This...meat that they call bbq in NC is NOT bar b que! Period! Its shredded meat. There's no rub, not basted with sauce...nothing. They just have some vinegar you can put on the side with some chilli flakes in it. THATS NOT BARBQUE! Okay. I'm stepping off the soap box now.

Last there was the wedding cake. It was a lovely layered cake--each layer was a different flavor. I had the carrot cake. It was moist and yummy. AND pretty without a lot of fake icing. I haaaate that serious buttercreme stuff that tastes like shortening. In between the festivities we went tooling around town to different restaurants. Niiiice stuff. We'll post'em soon.

He: Lilly's Pizza

When I was little there was a couple of meals that just stuck as things that my family always made. The two things that stick out in my head that my excelled at were baked chicken with noodles and steamed broccoli, and spaghetti with either meat sauce or white clam sauce. I can't say that I have fond memories of the chicken, although I probably lived off the noodles...and probably would to this day, if it wasn't for the Atkins diet and all of those years thinking that carbohydrates were bad. Unlike the chicken, I do have very fond memories of the spaghetti and clam sauce (or meat sauce), and today I can make those sauces with no effort at all. If given the chance to relive those memories of the family around the table with spaghetti and sauce, and garlic bread that would make even garlic farmers blush is something that I'd love to be able to do.

Later, once I was living on my own, trying to survive as a post college, semi-lost adult I attempted to develop my palate in Raleigh. I developed a love for a few distinct spots that my college buddies and I seemed to spend way too much time in. One of those classic spots for us was this little eclectic pizza place called Lilly's. The whole place is just a hodgepodge of styles, with old sections of cathedral ceilings just lying on the floor, and a bliniking sign near the bar that just says 'wow'. Even with the hodgepodge they make the best pizza that I think that I've ever eaten. The last time that I was able to enjoy a slice was about 7 years ago.

Thanks to by best friend Steve, and his new bride Mary, Brandy and I got the opportunity to enjoy a slice from this fantastic little place. Here are a few shots of the place, and what doesn't look like an incredible pizza....but the thing that I say when people ask is that the dough they make is soo good that you'd almost like to eat the crust..and then maybe the rest. Trust me this is something that if you ever make it to Raleigh, you have to try at least once.

She: Explaining Delusions

First, Mark's last post was a mea culpa, of sorts. First, since I've been traveling this month I told him that HE needed to be in charge of the blog this month, and do his fair-share of writing for a change...which didn't happen. And, we had our oven break, and in another delusion, he decided to fix it himself, which took 2 weeks to complete (and a repairman did most anyways) so even if I WANTED to bake and post I couldn't. As far as the tomato plants he's referring to? 3. Thats right, three whole tomato plants and he thought he'd have enough to bottle ketchup. He gets these bright, half-baked ideas, and I sit in the back of the room saying, that its all nice and well, but will never be a reality if you don't have a gameplan. Which he usually doesn't. So if I don't decide to take over (like I did with the tomato plants...he just forgot the water them for 2 weeks, snort) then I get a blog without the HE component to counterbalance, an unusable oven, and other mangled ideas. But thats what makes us great--he's got the optimism, and I have the practicality--together we can pull off anything...but only if I'm in town to give'm a nudge.

He: Delusions of Grandeur

Everyone knows the old saying 'don't count your chickens before they hatch'. Well, in my world that should extend a whole lot further. A couple of years ago when Brandy and I were still living in Atlanta we had a garden. The delusion that I had going is that we would have tomatoes coming out of our ears. I was sure that we would have sooo many tomatoes that we would have more than enough to sell some to the restaurant that I was working for at the time. I was sure that we would have soo many tomatoes that after canning, and drying, and the selling them that we would still be eating them until we couldn't stand it. As fate would have it, we ended up having a massive thunderstorm when the plants were loaded down with fruit and we lost a ton of tomatoes. Of course I was distraught...and the wonderful ninja poster just below had a hearty round of 'I told you so'. I'm sure that you will see my delusions of grandeur rear it's ugly head many times in the future.

She: Ninjas + Food...

Okay, check this link out...Adventure Dining. Now, some people like a little...unique spice to their meals. Eating in the dark while blind waiters serve you is trendy now. Could be cool...but I'd be really worried about how clean the place is...I know. I have a suspicious mind. But this article, this boggles the mind. Or atleast, MY mind. Ninjas! "Ninja New York" is a restaurant where "the wait staff at Ninja New York has been rumored to leap out and startle visitors from the shadows, scale walls, mysteriously appear and disappear..." Thats right. The chef and the wait staff are all reported to be Ninjas serving you in ninja style.

I find this absolutely hilarious. BUT, not enough that I wouldn't actually go if it wasn't a bazillion dollars to eat there like I think it probably would. Of course, I do understand that its showy, and doesn't tell us about the food itself at all or if it's worth eating. But, as Mark says, restaurants are part of the hospitality industry, meaning they need to be hospitable and entertaining, since thats partly what you pay for. And I, just once, might like to be served my buffalo wings with stealth, smoke and mirrors.

She: Truffles galore

I went to the Oak Cafe and was served some scrumptious truffles. I bought a few to take home, and on the way FROM the cafe TO the car, it melted into a pool! So I decided to make my own. I used one of Mark's books, "Chocolate" by N. Malgieri...I usually stay away from it because its so...well, cheffy. A thousand silly ingredients and specific temps...if I can find a work-around, I will use it. But, not with chocolate. Too tricky. I decided to go crazy and make lemon flavored, dark chocolate truffles with milk chocolate coating. Ha! So here it goes:
Ingredients:
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 tbs unsalted butter
1 tbs light corn syrup
8 oz bittersweet chocolate (72%)
grated peel of 2 lemons

Coating: 12 oz milk chocolate (50%) and a plate coated in dutch process cocoa powder.
First, cut your bittersweet chocolate into slivers and put it in a glass bowl with the lemon peel. Then mix cream, butter and corn syrup in a pan and bring to a low simmer. Remove from heat, and add to your glass pan of chocolate. Whisk smooth, and cool the mix for 2-3 hours in the fridge. Roll into balls and put on a cookie sheet, which you put back in the fridge for another hour.
Melt the milk chocolate to about 95, and let cool to the low 80's (F) and dip your truffles--I put the chocolate in my icecream scoop and then rolled the truffle around to coat. Let cool for a few minutes, then roll in the cocoa powder. Keep them chilled til you wanna eat them, then let them reach room temp. Yummy!

He: For the love of god...if you make nothing else...MAKE THIS CAKE!

How's that for a tagline? All due to the amazing cake that almost wasn't made.
Brandy and I were running through our area whole foods looking for ingredients. We were trying to find something that would inspire us to make a dessert with some of the apples that I had picked up earlier in the day (it's apple season right now...enjoy them while they rock). We talked about maybe some sort of turnover....nah. We talked about maybe making a pie...just too plain to really be us. I talked about some sort of thing that is in phyllo dough...that was shot down on the principle of being too cheffy (happens all the time in our house). By the time that we were out of the store we were really no closer to figuring out what we wanted to make with the damn apples...then it hit me....Scott's apple cake.

When I was working everyday at Watershed this cake went virtually unnoticed in my mind. I'm not sure if it's the leaden death-bomb quality of all of the peanut oil in it, or the almost gritty sugar glaze over the top. I never quite saw it for the beautiful thing that it is...just this wonderfully rich cake that beautifully shows off in-season apples. Sure...it does have a lot of sugar, and the glaze almost hurts it's so full of sugar...but if you don't attempt any other recipes on this site you must try this one!

Okay I just thought of one more thing that is kinda cool that you should know about this post...apples. The apples that the original recipe calls for are winesaps. Well, here in this part of California that isn't something that seems to be available right now. I ended up using pippins (which are a japanese creation crossing a yellow delicious with a granny smith). Also used were gravensteins, which I don't know the history of..but if anyone out there does please enlighten me. The last variety was some sort of crisp apple, as in there was 'crisp' in the name but I can't think of the variety now. When working on anything with apples it's always better to have more than one variety so that there will be greater depth of apple flavor (just one and it will be very monotonous as far as the apple flavor goes).

Here's the recipe:
1 C. packed light brown sugar
1 C. granulated sugar
1 1/2 C. vegetable oil (we used peanut oil at the restaurant..just make sure that the oil doesn't have any strong flavors...I bet grapeseed would be very nice in this)
3 eggs (at room temperature)
1 t. baking soda
2 t. ground ceylon cinnamon (very important...most cinnamon is vietnamese, and it's way too spicy for this preparation)
1/2 t. freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 t. salt (fine grain sea salt preferrably)
5 ea. fresh apples peeled, cored and diced into 1/2" pieces (baking varieties)
1 1/4 C. coarsely chopped pecans
2 1/4 t. vanilla extract

The Glaze
4 Tbsp. unsalted butter
1/4 C. granulated sugar
1/4 C. packed light brown sugar
pinch of salt
1/2 C. heavy cream

1) Preheat oven to 325 degrees
2) Mix the sugars and oil in a bowl until well blended
3) Add the eggs one at a time and mix until each is incorporated
4) Sift together the dry ingredients and mix into the wet..stirring only to incorporate (if you overmix at all this cake will be really dense and hard)
5) Fold in the apples and pecans and vanilla
6) pour into a buttered and floured 9X13 inch pan and bake until the cake tests clean with a skewer (ours took 2 hours.....don't expect this to be accurate for everyone else. At the restaurant the cook time on this cake varied a lot! Start checking it after 1 hour)
7) Allow to cool in the pan completely (about an hour
8) To make the glaze melt the butter in a saucepan, add the sugars and salt, stir until well blended and cook over med-low heat for 2 minutes. Add the heavy cream, stir and bring to a boil...cook 2 more minutes.
9) Quickly poke holes with a skewer or fork all over the top of the cake, and with the hot glaze pour it over the cake.
10) Allow to cool slightly, and then enjoy this fantastic old southern treat.