What more could anyone want in a one-stop shop? Cheap gas. They’ve got it. Theatre style popcorn. Check. No Ethanol (phew). And Pepsi products to wash down those sweet, sweet pig lips. Sadly I didn’t stop in to check it out.

In no particular order, allow me to disgorge some thoughts and links:

- Pre-made pesto from Costco is kind of my personal lazy-dinner lifesaver. Add more garlic, add some heavy cream, pour it over chicken, put in some lemon and spoon it over some fish…whatever! All is within the realm of possibility! I’M LAZY ADDICTED.

- I love bakeries and baking, and I could never do a diet that didn’t let me eat a ton of bread. Appalling idea. Take all the fun out of life along with the fat from your thighs. Near my new place, I have Buzz (which I haven’t tried yet but fully intend to), and the Shirlington outpost of CakeLove, which I visited the other day before seeing Juno. More pricey than I remembered, but if you’re in the area, grabbing a Crunchy Feet ain’t so bad as you walk. I know there’s a Great Harvest somewhere, but unfortunately haven’t had much of a chance to find it, and oh man, a Krispy Kreme naught but four miles down Route 1.

- In baking news, I have been making mad amounts of banana bread, since an entire hand doesn’t seem to get consumed before the last three or so get irrevocably brown. Not banana NUT bread, mind you – nuts feel like a dilution of the pure banana derriciousness.

Quick and dirty recipe:

- 4 redonkulously ripe bananas (what can brown do for you? ::snerk)

- 1.5 c. flour (I usually do half wheat, half white. No idea why. I think my brain thinks it’s vaguely “healthy.” No science backing that one up what-so-ever.)

- 8 tsp. butter (one stick…butterstick…PANDA!)

- 1 c. sugar

- 1 tsp. baking soda

- 1 tsp. baking power

- 2 eggs

- pinch of salt

- cinnamon to taste if so desired

Bake at 350 degrees for 55 minutes for a loaf, 10-13 minutes for mini muffins, and like…25-30 for normal human-sized muffins. Or until a toothpick, knife, letter opener, some variety of pointy thing comes out clean.

- On the DC Restaurant list, I hit TenPenh (on 10th and Pennsylvannia Ave…GET IT??? ha.) and Southside 815 in Alexandria on S. Washington Street recently. TenPenh was actually pretty good, despite the inconsistency of reviews on ChowHound. I had the Lumpia, the Beef Tenderloin, and the Saigon pumpkin bread for dessert. We can’t forget the Mangolian Mist martini, either – derricious! And during Restaurant Week, it’s a pretty decent deal at $30 for three courses.

On the other hand, I wasn’t particularly impressed by Southside 815. Solid, but not impressive. I prefer Old Hickory Grille on Route 50 by FAR for my comfortable, Southernish-cookin’ fix. On Fridays and Saturdays, Hickory’s crawfish bisque is fucking amazing. For serious. As in, I have a semi-regular appointment with this restaurant for cornbread knots and bisque. Oh man. Have I mentioned this place before?

- On the eco-fooding front, I’ve been giving serious consideration to joining a CSA (community-supported agriculture). I’m not ever going to be giving up meat, cheese, or milk, so I’ve been thinking about what I can do to make my eating habits more earth-friendly and healthy within my parameters. This is one strategy I’m considering – adding more local and seasonal:

Basically, you sign up for a share of what an area farm produces, and you can either pick it up at a drop-off point nearby, or have it delivered. Generally, the share lasts through the growing season, approximately 22 weeks from May-ish to October-ish, and you get whatever’s growing on that particular farm at that particular time. It runs around $20-30 a week for a share big enough for two people who cook at home most of the week. Sites like Future Harvest and LocalHarvest can help you find a farm. There are also meat, milk, egg, fruit, and winter veggie shares available. There are general caveats though; this isn’t really for the unadventurous eater, as there aren’t really guaranteed lists for what you’ll get every week. You have to be willing to experiment.

- And finally, a request: If you’ve had any experience with Anson Mills, TELL ME ALL ABOUT IT. I’m about to buy some, but I want more details about the baking/cooking process than the (pretty gorgeous) website supplies.

There, I’ve probably overwhelmed you with my scatterbrained-ness, so I’ll save some for next time.

For those of you who don’t know, I recently moved to New York – not only to get away from my dull corporate job, but to finally realize my dream of going to pastry school and becoming a real pastry chef! (cue triumphant music) And because I know all of you are checking this blog not just because you love food, but in order to procrastinate from working for the man or studying, I’m going to blog about my experience as a pastry student!

I have a full-time job working as an administrator/office manager at a small artisanal bakery in SoHo. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings I hop on over to the French Culinary Institute for 5 hours of class. The FCI is an intense program aimed mainly at those who do not have a lot of restaurant experience. Most people in my class have worked in bakeries or in food service and are avid home bakers, which is my experience as well.

Wednesday my classmates and I all arrived super-early to get our ID cards & get dressed. Our uniforms consist of houndstooth MC Hammer pants (complete with elastic waistband…tres chic) a neckerchief, chef’s jacket, long apron, and side towel. Class starts quickly, with Chef Rebecca & Chef Kir introducing themselves and all of us eager students doing the same.

Day 1 is apple tart day, so appropriately, we start off with apples for an apple compote. Chef Rebecca does a quick demo and then we’re off! The demo is informative, but very basic – she doesn’t spend time going over every minute detail. My table partner and I grab some apples, get our mis en place ready, and start peeling. The peeler we are given is abominable, so I resort the ubersharp paring knife. Unfortunately, I don’t peel apples that often – I’m lazy and like peels – so I was rather slow and ugly in my peeling. My knife skills also left much to be desired, but that could have been the slightly squishy Golden Delicious apples I had to work with. Then again, it wasn’t like my entire class was schooling me in perfect dicing – you just feel pressure to be totally awesome in a class environment where there’s a professional chef eyeing your knife technique.

After the dicing part, we concocted a simple apple compote with our diced apples, sugar, lemon juice, & vanilla paste (more concentrated than vanilla extract, not quite as good – or as expensive – as vanilla beans). It cooked til it was a chunky applesaucey consistency and then was spread out on a sheet pan to cool.

Next was pate sucree. Francophiles and foodies will know that this means “sugared pastry” and is a very simple dough to make. We creamed butter & powdered sugar together and gradually added eggs to make an emulsification. Then cake flour was slowly added to make the dough. Pate sucree is similar to a shortbread dough, and not nearly as temperamental as pate brisee or a traditional pie crust.

For our own tart shells, we used pate sucree made by a previous class, because dough needs time to chill and rest before shaping. We started by hammering out our dough circles with rolling pins. With 18 students on stainless steel tables, it was a bit loud. We brushed off all the extra flour from the crust (more flour = more gluten = tough dough) and rolled it into a prepared tart ring.

Post-dinner, the tart shells came back out and were filled with the cooled apple compote – which looked kind of like canned crushed pineapple, oddly enough. We had to peel more apples and slice them ever-so-thinly to spiral around the top. Never have I appreciated granny smith apples more – they are so nice and firm, so perfect for cutting into thin fancy slices! Golden delicious apples, not so much. Many of my thin little apple slices came apart, but I managed to salvage enough so that they appeared pretty. I spiraled my apples and then we sprinkled them with vanilla sugar, then into the ovens!

While we were finishing our tarts, Chef Rebecca told us a little about the philosophy of French pastry. For apple tarts, cinnamon is a major faux-pas. The French believe that the pastry to be about showcasing the fruit, with only a limited number of other ingredients just added to enhance the natural flavor. So for the apple tart, only some lemon juice, vanilla & sugar, et voila! another class.

One apple tart may not sound like a huge undertaking for a 4-hour class, but it went quickly and we were rushing around using every moment. Even having made pies and tarts before, it was a bit stressful. None of us quite know where everything is yet, but are all trying to impress and make our tarts as beautiful and as tasty as possible.

Once I stumbled home late at night, my roommates peeped out of their rooms for some apple tart enjoyment. It was still warm and quite tasty, with a thick crispy crust and sweet filling.

Stay tuned for more adventures in tart-making….

Technorati Tags: Baking, Cooking Class

The most difficult thing about the Banana Twinkie is finding one. Yesterday, my friend James and I scoured midtown Manhattan for about an hour, stopping at every deli and grocery store we passed. Twinkies, to start off with, have become a rarity in New York. The Banana Twinkie is an even rarer animal. Luckily for me, I don’t live in Manhattan, and in Brooklyn, there are still delis that have a hostess shelf.

So, this morning, on my way into work, I shelled out two bucks and bought two delightful packages of Hostess products: a package of “NEW!” Banana Twinkies, and for comparison, a normal package of Vanilla Twinkies.

The first thing that you notice is that they actually do look a little different. The regular vanilla Twinkies are a paler shade of yellow, just a couple shades darker than an off white. The Banana Twinkies, on the other hand, are a true gold. They even look a little bit bigger, though this could just be because my banana Twinkies are sitting side by side on their little piece of waxed white cardboard while for some reason, my vanilla Twinkies are askew of each other. Quality Assurance seems to have faded at the Hostess Factory. (I’d show you pictures, but I’m too poor for digital camera ownership.)

The vanilla Twinkie cake is very spongy. It doesn’t taste like “vanilla” so much as like “sugar”, or more accurately, like “corn syrup”. There’s a distinctive after taste, sort of bitter and in the back of my throat. It comes on pretty quickly, I think it’s in the cake. That flavor is in the Banana Twinkie as well, but definitely lessened. Actually, the Banana Twinkie has a surprisingly strong banana flavor on top of the flavor of corn syrup, and frankly, it is not unpleasant. It’s there enough that you can definitely tell that it’s not the normal Twinkie, but light enough that it’s not overpowering. What’s more, although it’s the same cake itself, the proximity to the filling has managed to infuse the Banana Twinkie’s cake with some of its flavor. The cake itself seems moister than the regular Twinkie, but this could simply be that because the Banana Twinkie is so new, there really isn’t as much time for it to sit around in factories (or the deli shelves). The banana flavor is definitely artificial though, which is kind of funny.

See, the Twinkie was originally a banana flavored treat. That’s the reason that it’s tube like and sort of, you know, phallic. It’s supposed to look like a cuter banana. (The shape is actually due to the shortcake tins that they’re baked in, but they chose those shortcake tins for a reason!) Twinkies stayed banana from their inception until World War II, when a national banana shortage forced Hostess to replace their banana filling with Vanilla (no, not a joke). The fact that they’ve been brought back without any real banana in them is a loving testament to our boys fighting Adolf. (The banana Twinkies do contain less than 1% of banana puree, meaning that for every batch of 100,000 Twinkies, there are about three bananas – we can’t give those boys everything or else what’ll they want to come home for?)

For the health conscious out there: though I’ve heard people think that the Banana Twinkies are healthier than the regular, they aren’t by any stretch of the imagination. The Banana Twinkies have another 5 calories per cake, plus another gram of fat and have a small amount of trans-fatty acids, which the Vanilla Twinkies do not. However, the Banana Twinkies do have slightly less sodium (maybe responsible for the fainter aftertaste?), cholesterol, and carbohydrates than the vanilla, and a couple fewer grams of sugar. I know that few people are eating Twinkies for their health anymore, but I still thought you might like to know.

All in all, I’d consider the Banana Twinkies to be a bit better than the regular. The banana flavor really helps you forget that you’re basically eating a stick of sugar and saturated fat, and helps to cover up that horrible aftertaste that you get from the Vanilla Twinkies. Prepare for indigestion and, if you’re like me, a sugar headache. Still, if you’re a dedicated junk foody, the Banana Twinkie will form a nice new addition to your sweet repertoire.

Skip,

I’ve been checking out your site (I like it, especially your review about doughnuts) and I had a little suggestion for you. I assume that you too are an NPR man, but I can imagine that catching Morning Edition is a bit of a stretch for you. Because of that, you may have missed the news that Twinkies have just gone back to using banana cream instead of vanilla. They used to be banana, but there was some shortage back in WWII and they switched over to vanilla. Now though, back. I think it’d be a good article for the gourmetro. In fact, if you needed, I’d help you eat the Twinkies. I need an excuse, I can’t put that much saturated fat into my body for no good reason. Hope you’re well, still hoping that we could go out for breakfast some time. Later.

Jake

—–

Jake, Thanks for the note, it’s been a while. I am a bit of an NPR man, myself, and as you guessed don’t really listen to Morning Edition. Their podcasts rock my world (Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, and I’m getting into This American Life). I had heard about banana’s triumphant return to the twinkie, but don’t think I could make myself eat enough of them to write a post (I like to save my saturated fat for those aforementioned doughnuts. That said, I am intrigued by the filling switch since I’d previously heard they were discontinuing the tuber altogether (nb – link doesn’t exactly say they’re discontinuing the twinkie, but that Interstate Bakery’s fallen on hard times). So if you want to have some and tell us about it, please do!

Best,
Skip