Summers are hot. Summers in a house with no air conditioning are even hotter. To keep temperatures inside from rising past Real Sweaty and straight into Living on the Sun, I try to keep my stove time as short as possible when cooking anything. So when my friend Katie found a recipe for a quick pasta dinner that incorporated two of my favorite things — (1) tinned fish and (2) not being on fire — I immediately knew this was something I’d have to break out every summer.
All the things that go into the pasta are thrown into one bowl, and get this: it is “cooked” by placing that bowl on top of the pot of water while the pasta boils. The heat from the boiling water is enough to warm everything through so that you only need to use one stove burner and the stove only needs to be on as long as it takes to cook your spaghetti.
I have made ice cream approximately… *counts on fingers*… one time in my life, and that was in elementary school. We filled a bag with the ice cream mix, then put that bag inside another bag, then put that bag inside yet another bag full of ice and rock salt, and tossed it around to each other until it solidified through a combination of physics and magic. This blew Grade School Amy’s mind, but a later attempt to recreate the process at home ended in a burst-bag-salty-ice-water-all-over-the-kitchen-floor tragedy.
A mere two decades later, I finally have redemption.
This post is several months late, but you know, it’s a spice cake and those are very winter appropriate (not to mention Thanksgiving appropriate if you want an alternative to pumpkin pie!) so here it is nonetheless. This past summer was the 11th year of my annual reread of Lord of the Rings, and this time my friend Katie joined me. To make it a truly immersive Middle Earth experience, every time we finished one of the books, we’d prepare a themed meal and watch the corresponding movie. For Fellowship of the Ring, we had a dinner of mushrooms that even Farmer Maggot would envy. But for The Two Towers, we wanted something sweet.
I get a weird number of spam emails and comments for this blog that I think are severely disproportionate to the amount of traffic my posts actually receive. You’re wasting your time, spambots! No one reads this blog! Though what is time to a robot or a line of code? What is energy to a non-sentient entity that requires no rest and no fuel?
What is anything to anyone anywhere anyhow?
Many questions, no answers, just posole.
The first time I ever had charred shishito peppers was at Umi Sake House in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood, and it blew my mind. A friend had ordered it to share, and when it arrived, I definitely looked at the small pile of peppers with a great deal of skepticism.
Peppers? As an appetizer? Wouldn’t that, you know, hurt to eat? But you guys, it… well, it does hurt. Sometimes. I wouldn’t lie to you. This is a place of honesty and trust, after all. But mostly, the peppers are an insanely addictive combination of sweet and bitter, with just a small dose of heat. Except for sometimes, like I mentioned, when it is a large dose of heat. But they always seem to be the minority, and in any case I think it just heightens the experience when you have no idea if you’ll come across a “surprise pepper” that lays on the napalm inside your mouth. Does that not sound great to you?
No? Just me?
Fine.
Birthday cake, round two: weekend edition. To drag my birthday week out and end it on a high note, my friends and I had a great meal at Oddfellows on Saturday night. I highly recommend that place for any gathering — the service was great and the food and drinks were delicious!
Hello, party people!
I used to go there just for casual lunches and snacks when I still lived in that neighborhood, and it doesn’t hurt that Oddfellows is next to my favorite bookstore in the city, either. Work up an appetite browsing and purchasing new lovely things to read, then pop over next door for a meal — that’s the ideal weekend activity, if you ask me.
But I’m still of the mindset that anything calling itself a birthday celebration is incomplete without cake, so I made something I’ve been meaning to make for a long time: an intensely chocolate cake.
My birthday is today and true to form, I’ve made my own birthday cake. Or rather, I made one to “celebrate all the April birthdays in my office” but who are we kidding, I made this cake for me.
My birthday cake for the last few years has been varying iterations of a fruit and custard cake because it is the best kind of cake in existence and if you disagree you are wrong, but that’s a post for another time. This post is about a different kind of cake, because this is a different kind of birthday. This year, I’m turning 30.
