Big Star

So my Mom has been trying to take me to eat at the Mexican Restaurant Big Star in Wicker Park for years now. We've always run out of time, or forgotten about it, and so we never were able to try it. However, I was in Chicago visiting my family for Rosh Hashanah last week. The timing worked perfectly because the Midwest Geobiology Symposium was being held in Chicago this weekend, so I just met the other members of my lab group in the city. I had to meet up with them on Friday evening, but I spend the rest of the day with my Mom. I love spending time with her, we always have such a nice time! We decided to finally get lunch at Big Star, then walk around Wicker Park before meeting up with a friend in the afternoon. 

Big Star is an awesome restaurant and we went on the perfect day. It's a small place with a huge outdoor seating area. It has a sit down section, and a take out window and picnic table area. We sat down to eat. We ordered guac and chips (yumm) and I got a cider. It was from somewhere I hadn't tried, Vandermill. A nice crisp Michigan cider. I liked it alot and It had 8% alcohol content, so I definitely felt the drink. For out main meal I got a sweet potato taco and a zucchini tostada. Both were good but the taco was rather spicy. The tostada definitely stole the show, and I could pick it up and eat it without it falling apart, excellent quality right there!

It was a really pleasant afternoon! The food, company, and weather made it so. I forget how much I love Chicago until I really spend some time in the city, but I'm so lucky to have grown up close to such a vibrant, amazing city. 

Baked Cinnamon Apple Cider Donuts

This is a very delayed post about my Donut adventures with my mom and sister. My mom bought donut pans about a year ago and had yet to try them. So one afternoon the three of us decided to make donuts together. We agreed on apple cinnamon donuts, since we loved the homemade ones from our local apple orchard. We used spiced apple cider to give the donuts the apple flavor. Also my sister came up with the awesome idea to shake the donuts in a paper bag of cinnamon sugar to coat them. These donuts ended up tasting good… but not like what we expected them to. They were less cakey and less sweet. We still aren't really sure why. They did taste amazing dipped in coffee though. And them not meeting our expectations didn't stop them from disappearing from the house in a couple of days, as they were devoured for breakfast and late night treats. Goes to show that while you can be disappointed in something, doesn't mean that you don't also like it. Regardless, it was really fun to bake with my mom and sister, they are 100% the experts so I usually just do what they tell me to, and everything works out fine. 

Homemade High Tea

One of the fun food things in Australia is that like England, they have a tea time/afternoon snack culture. Now, this isn't really as prevalent as it is in Britain, but it made me start thinking about High Tea. And this lead me to he idea of making a fancy high tea once I got home. And naturally, this sort of genius had to be shared with my baker of a sister. So we resolved to make ourselves a fancy homemade high tea when I got back to Chicago. For those of you that don't know, High Tea is a multi-course afternoon meal, usually consisting of finger sandwiches, pastries, and scones. My sister and I carefully planned out our tea, bought the ingredients, and spent an entire day preparing this meal. It was an ambitious endeavor, but really it turned out wonderfully. We even had menus (below). 

We had this wonderful fancy chocolate rose tea that my sister had gotten in London. We tried to make some fun tea treats to go along with it. We basically divided and conquered the cooking, but I had a couple of minor difficulties so my sister ended up helping me out some, especially with making things look nice. Our first course was a platter of fruit salads, which we decided to call the amuse bouche. I rolled cantaloupe balls in procuitto (yes it's a meat, but it's the only part of this meal that is), the saltiness of the procuitto and the sweetness of the melon go amazingly together. I also this crazy watermelon/feta salad. I constructed a cube of rectangular pieces and then garnished it with mint. It didn't turn out quite was pretty as I hoped for, but it tasted amazing. The winner of this salad was the mint, it brought out the freshness of both the fruit and the cheese. Can't wait to make this one again (though maybe not in cube form).

Our second course was the savory finger sandwiches and deviled eggs! This was fun to make because we got to choose what flavors we wanted to use. I ended up making 4 types of sandwich, and 2 kinds of deviled eggs. For the sandwiches we ended up making all vegetarian ones. I used two types of bread: light rye and honey wheat. I cut off the crusts and then cut the bread into the fun shapes of triangles and rectangles. I did 3 sandwiches on the rye and one on the honey wheat. The honey wheat one was pears and goat cheese. The first of the rye sandwiches were cream cheese and cucumber (classic tea sandwich). Next I made some eggs salad and made egg salad sandwiches. I tried not to use too much mayonnaise, but then didn't use enough and the egg salad didn't stay together all that well. We garnished those sandwiches with fresh chives (see below). The last sandwich was a pickle cheddar, and dill butter sandwich. This one was probably my favorite. The pickle and cheddar went together amazingly, but the dill butter really made this one. I actually infused the butter with dill and salt. This made it really dill tasting and fresh and it added another dimension to the sandwich.

Okay the deviled eggs. My mom gave me this wonderful book full of deviled egg recipes for a present. My sister and I decided to try two kinds of deviled eggs from the book. The first was Sunrise eggs (below left) and the second was Boursin Garlic eggs (below right). The Boursin ones were the winners! The sunrise eggs were infused with orange juice and sundried tomato pesto. I really wanted to like these eggs, but they just tasted a little too weird. The boursin ones on the other hand were out of this world. We added roasted garlic and herbed boursin cheese. We then garnished them with fresh chives. The creaminess of the boursin and the flavoring of the garlic and herbs made these eggs taste gourmet. We loved them, I will definitely make them again.

                         

Our next course was a tea time classic. Scones! I while I would have preferred Australian/British scones we instead used the awesome scone mix from World Market. We got the plain flavor, and I have to say these were absolutely amazing. While at World Market we found mini jams and clotted cream! So we got that to eat with the scones in the traditional manner. They were delicious and really fun.

After scones we got to the pastries, specifically cookies and cakes. We had Earl Grey Lavender Cupcakes (below left), made by my wonderful sister. She infused the cake with earl grey tea and the frosting with lavender extract. These were the perfect thing to go with tea, tea cupcakes! Next we had Petit Fours! Okay, these are my absolute favorite thing that my sister makes. They are her own invention of cake, call blush cake. This is almond cake with rose and orange extracts. And it's brilliant. For these petit fours she makes strawberry buttercream frosting for the middle layer and then dips them in orange glaze. They. Are. The. Best. And they take her a long time to make because they have so many components. She doesn't make them often, but did them for me as a back from Australia treat. Also they were a perfect addition to high tea. The last dessert in this course was Raspberry frosting sugar cookie sandwiches. These were also outstanding. We found this wonderful soft sugar cookie recipe, and used that for the cookies. My sister then made this wonderful raspberry buttercream that was  heavenly. Lastly she sugared the cookies with raspberry sugar. Is your mouth watering yet?

Our last course was Midgardises, little ending sweets. For this we made Lemon shortbread dark chocolate truffles… and we also bought some meringues from Trader Joes (below). The Truffles were made in a very similar fashion to my Tim Tam Truffles. We used shortbread cookies, lemon curd, and cream cheese frosting to make these. Also we used food coloring to make sure that the filling had a nice lemon yellow color. This time we stuck them in the fridge to harden for a hour or so before they were dipped in the chocolate. Also my sister did the dipping so they turned out pretty!

This tea was such a fun and exciting thing to do with a summer day!! Almost everything (looking at you sunrise eggs!) turned out excellently! It was also really fun to spend the day cooking and baking with my sister. She's the master dessert baker and watching her work reminds me that I have a ton to learn when it comes to baking and cooking, thankfully I have access to a wonderful teacher :D

Pavlova

So Pavlova is a traditional Australian dessert. It's basically a gigantic meringue with fruit and cream. I have been wanting to try one since before I came to Australia, but unfortunately I really had a hard time finding them anywhere. I think that is because they are something that is more accessible and nicer restaurants, instead of the places that I was usually frequenting. Fortunately, when I was with my family we were eating at really nice restaurants. So our last night in Sydney, on our way back from New Zealand, Pavlova was on the dessert menu. So naturally, I had to order it! It was pavlova with passionfruit. Now, I can take or leave passionfruit, but it was the meringue that I really wanted to taste. It came out in an enormous slice, and we all had some. It. Was. Fantastic!!!! The meringue had a different consistency throughout, light and fluffy in the middle, cake like and then chewy on the outside. I loved it! I was also really happy that I could end my time in Australia by tasting a dessert that I had wanted to try for so long. I was the perfect treat to end my journey. 

Kiwiana: New Zealand Snack Food

So because I loved tasting Aussie candy and snack food so much, I really wanted to try some Kiwi snack food when I was in New Zealand. Specifically, CookieTime cookies, which a couple friends and told me about. When one of our tour guides asked it we wanted to do anything else before we went to our hotel, I asked if we could stop at a convenience store for some cookies! Our guide loved this idea and was nice enough to help us pick out some other classic kiwi snacks. My mom and sister got really into it, but no so much my dad, haha. We ended up with some CookieTime cookies (above), which were yummy. I tend to like my cookies a little softer, but they tasted really good. My favorite thing was the BumperBar, which is also made by CookieTime, but has fruit and chocolate in it. I liked these better because they were chewy and had fresh fruit in them!! The banana ones were amazing!!!

My sister's favorite thing was the Pineapple Lumps. I had totally forgotten that I tried these in Australia. I didn't love them because I had been expecting something else when I tried them. My sister pointed out that they were like pineapple Charleston Chews, and she love love loved them. I like them just fine now that I think of them that way. Also apparently they are much bigger in NZ than Oz, so it was nice to try them there. 

We didn't get to try Hokey Pokey Ice Cream, which is also supposed to be huge in New Zealand, but hopefully we'll be back someday and can try it then :) Eating gourmet abroad is fun, but trying classic junk food also gives you a unique taste of the culture, and is a super fun way to explore a country. It is now on my list of things to make sure I do whenever I'm somewhere new!

Superbowl "Mini" Pizzas

 I'm not a big football fan, but my Dad is. So every year when I was home (which is basically every year except for the past two when I was in STL), my Mom would make a ton of fun snacks and we would watch the game together. This year was nice because all four of us were home so we got to spend the time together, even if the game wasn't very exciting. What was exciting was my Dad's suggestion of what we do for snacks. He suggested making some homemade mini pizzas. It was a great idea! We ended up making 6 different kinds of pizza with various toppings and then we all got to taste them. It was also really cool because we all helped cook them together. My Dad worked in a pizza parlor when he was in college so he was spinning the dough to flatten it out, after a couple of tries he remembered how to do it! The pizzas we made were mostly NOT vegetarian, but since my Mom made her baked Salami (see below) which is one of my two meat exceptions (the other being Chicago hot dogs from my favorite hot dog joint), I was eating meat that day anyway so I was able to taste the meat ones as well. From left to right in the first picture above then the second we made chicken sausage, gouda and roasted pepper pizza, tomato and fresh mozzarella pizza, Bacon, Colby Jack and Mushroom pizza, prosuttio and parmesan pizza, pepperoni and mozzarella pizza, and pear, balsamic, and goat cheese pizza. A creative and diverse bunch of pizzas! My favorite was the bacon one, I don't know if that was because it was the best of the bunch or just because I haven't have bacon in soooo long that I missed it so much ;) My runner up was the chicken sausage one. I loved the gouda and peppers. it had a really nice smoky flavor to it. Ultimately we had about half of the pizza left over after we all had at it. So that meant some leftover pizza for the next week. I love cold pizza so I was quite happy about that.

Thoughts on these pizzas:

• The crust of the bacon one was the best because it was thin and crispy instead of doughy. Ironically, this was the one dough that I worked on and I had done such a "crappy" job (see above its not circular) that I was taken off dough duty. But it turned out that it wasn't too thin after all and even though it looked the ugliest it tasted the best. Haha goes to show presentation and taste don't always match!
• The parm prosuttio was really salty so it was probably my least favorite, it needed something to cut the salt. I think my mom wanted to put fresh greens on top (which would have done it) but the rest of us didn't want that so we ended up without it. 
• My sister brushed all of the crusts with garlic olive oil which crisped the crust nicely when baked, and also gave it a good flavor. This step is critical in order to get crust that tastes like something!
• If I was making this for me only, and not my meat eating family, I would probably made a veggie supreme kinda pizza with a ton of different veggies on it, but alas it was not to be this time around. 

I would love to do this again using what we learned from this time. Such a fun thing to do!