Cookies!

Easter is quickly approaching and I can't help but reminisce about the cookies my grandmother always used to buy us. You know the ones... oversized, holiday-inspired shapes, cellophane wrapping that was near impossible to open gracefully, edible icing eyes*, and of course the rock-hard icing coating. Something like these:

The funny thing is I don't remember actually eating them. First of all, I was one to savor cool looking food or those things I wanted to savor later. (This generally ended up in a disappointing letdown as the hype was 10x greater than the taste.) Secondly, I'm pretty sure I must have broken a tooth or two on these Quikrete concoctions. Biting I to them was more work than it was worth. Finally, they couldn't have tasted that great if I don't even remember how they tasted.

Anyone else remember these? Did you actually enjoy eating them or just the idea of them?

*If you know these cookies, you know these eyes. And there was always that one wonky eye that didn't see quite straight, thus adding to its charm!

Christmas in London (part 2)

So Christmas Eve was enjoyable and provided us with a laid-back day to ease into London. Christmas morning greeted us heartily with a humongous breakfast (see English Breakfast post) and allowed us to venture out for a lovely day of walking most of central London.

A major concern in booking this trip was the fact that everything we read said that EVERYTHING was closed on Christmas Day. Figuring most restaurants would be closed, I did exhaustive research online to find something- anything- that would be open for a decent holiday meal. Along came Ozer, a Turkish restaurant. Indeed they were open, with a regular menu even. Reservations made. Of course it wasn't right near our hotel, so we had to walk as the Tube IS closed on Christmas Day. No worries- no snow and good food made it worth it.

Never having eaten Turkish food, we were up for the challenge. No challenge here except how to narrow down our choices! With it's Mediterranean location, Turkey offers many foods similar to Greek cuisine (which we love). To start, we ordered an appetizer sampler- falafel, salads, eggplant, spinach & feta and the like. Score one for Ozer. Don found a more classic Christmas dish- turkey- for his entree. Yes, Turkish turkey. I went for the house special of grilled meatballs in a tomato and yogurt sauce. Score two more for Ozer. We had to top it all off with dessert, so we opted for Baklava. Once again, Ozer delivered. A nice holiday feast that will surely be our only Turkish Christmas dinner!

Ozer @ Oxford Circus

Christmas in London

Christmas Eve 2009 was our first (real) foray into English food. The salt-lick, yet strangely intriguing, baguette sandwich we had at Heathrow upon arrival doesn't really count. So, other than stocking up on crisps, not knowing if anything would be open where we could get food on Christmas Day, we ventured into the Jack Horner Pub for dinner. 

At first it felt a little weird to be in a pub at Christmastime, but a pint of Fuller's and some cheeky Brit fare changed our attitude entirely. The fish and chips came highly recommended by some fellow guests and then we took a chance on the Jack Horner Pie (specialty of the house)- a shepherd's pie type dish filled with meat and veggies. Both delivered on being delicious and filling. Who said English food is bland? We found it quite enjoyable; nothing a wee shake of salt couldn't cure! ;)

Score one for the London food scene so far. Sure, this was one of many in the Fuller Ale and Pie House chain, but it had the feel of a nice cozy local pub. Good beer, great food and fun people watching! Cheers to the Jack Horner Pub!

Jack Horner Pub, Tottenham Court Road

Of course, we opted out of dessert and decided to stock up on crisps, biscuits (aka cookies) and chocolate! Then off to the hotel to relax, watch some BBC on the tube and indulge in some nontraditional Christmas snacks.

Crepes

This past weekend reminded me of some wonderful memories I’ve had with the national pancake of France. We enjoyed dinner from Simply Crepes in Canandaigua with friends after a day of wine touring. I had a scrumptious combination of ham, brie, caramelized onion and apples while Don enjoyed an equally tasty crepe filled with turkey and smoked Gouda. For dessert we enjoyed Nutella with bananas and a strawberry/blueberry with vanilla ice cream. Delish!

Of course, we reminisced about our first Erie Canal kayak trip a couple of years ago. After our first night of camping, we set out from the JCC in Rochester to Pittsford. Our goal was to make it to Pittsford in time for breakfast at Simply Crepes. We made it and enjoyed perhaps the most posh breakfast any kayak campers have ever eaten. The perfect fuel for a full day of paddling!

Then we recalled the crepes we had in Paris. During our whirlwind tour of the City of Light, we stopped briefly outside the Pompideau Centre to research how good the crepes really are. First of all, the crepe itself had the diameter of a small kitchen table. Then, the crepe was smeared with the world’s most awesome substance- Nutella. Finally, Monsieur Crepe Guy took an entire banana and thinly sliced it onto the crepe. After a few folds, we had our quintessential Parisian crepe. Other than the fact that the Nutella turned into molten liquid and nearly burned every taste bud off our tongues, it was the most decadent, delectable and delightful street food we ever tasted. 

Post-crepe posing at Pompideau

I can’t think of crepes and not be reminded of my family’s Christmas breakfast tradition. Christmas morning means crepes. Mom never makes just one or two dozen, but (what seems like) about 60! There are the sweet varieties of either strawberry or applesauce, topped with powdered sugar. Then there is the savory crepe with ham, Swiss cheese and Mornay sauce. Breakfast always includes some kind of fruit and some type of bread or coffee cake, but the crepes remain the same: homemade, delicious and comforting.

Easter Candy

Easter is an amazing holiday for a kid, yet a dichotomous one for a Catholic kid. All that candy! You want to please your parents and CCD teacher, right? All that candy! But how can you focus on the Easter miracle, sitting on a hard church pew, when everyone else you know is already digging in to their sugar-filled baskets? All that candy! Well, you learn to cope for about an hour and then you dig in.

Some kids would wake up on Easter morning and go on a hunt for the candy left by the Easter Bunny himself. We, however, were in on the accumulation of our basket contents. Tradition took us to Antoinette’s Sweets, a chocolate dream that seemed to be in a far away land. Turns out, it was only about 7 miles from our house. Walking into Antoinette’s you were instantly hit with the aroma of chocolate wafting through the air. You had to walk past the ice cream parlor to get to the hall of chocolate. I’m sure it wasn’t that big of a room, but I swear it was the size of a football field at the time. Every size, shape and flavor of Easter candy existed on their shelves and tables. Hollow and solid. Milk, dark and orange? Bunnies, chicks, lambs, crosses and eggs. Oh, the joy of being able to pick out what we wanted. Upon returning home, we’d haul out the Easter baskets and fill them up just so. After the obligatory plastic grass went in, the candy set up followed. In went the chocolate of various sizes, shapes and flavors. Then add lots of jelly beans, Peeps (well-aged, of course), Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, malted milk eggs and more jelly beans. Part of the joy of the Easter basket was finding those long lost jelly beans at the bottom after you thought all the candy was gone!

Antoinette's Sweets

Nowadays I still enjoy Easter candy. We don’t make the trek to Antoinette’s anymore; we usually hit the drug stores and supermarkets the day after for 50% off deals. There’s nothing like Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs. They’re still as good as I remember. I think I could survive just by eating those alone. Peeps are still “cured” in an opened package until they reach peak crunchiness. Pastel M&Ms and jelly beans cater to the Easter sweet tooth just as well as anything. It just goes to show you that you don’t have to be a kid to enjoy the Easter candy season.

Chocolate: The Early Years

"If you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you. But you have no chocolate! I think of that again and again! My dear, how will you ever manage?" - Marquise de Sévigné

Chocolate ice cream, chocolate cereal, chocolate cake, chocolate cookies, chocolate licorice. Bring it on! I’ll even take vanilla ice cream with any kind of chocolate in it. Mint chocolate chip is always a favorite, but not because of the mint. In terms of cereal, I enjoyed Cocoa Krispies and Cocoa Puffs way more than any fruity counterpart like Fruity Pebbles, Trix or Fruit Loops. As far as cake, there had to be some form of chocolate in and/or on it. A birthday cake was at times a Carvel cake and since it had the heavenly chocolate crunchies in the middle, it passed the chocolate test. When we went homemade, it was almost always a Texas sheet cake: chocolate cake and chocolate frosting! Don’t forget a Black Forest cake every now and then. And Chocolate Sin... Cookies were always better with some kind of chocolate in them. Oreos were a staple in the pantry, but there was nothing like a homemade chocolate chip cookie (or just the dough). Even muffins are better with chocolate chips. Then there’s chocolate licorice. OK, so it’s not actually licorice, but it looks like licorice and tastes like chocolate. I was glad to find out that chocolate licorice wasn’t just a Buffalo thing. There are chocolate Twizzlers and a local farm market carried a homemade version as well. Chocolate Necco wafers even do the trick. Good to know I can still get a chocolate fix in many different forms.

It’s all good, but then there’s just chocolate. Whether it takes the form of a bar, a bunny or a wafer, I’ll take it. Thinking back to my trick-or-treating days, it was all about the chocolate. I was never into gum, Smarties, Skittles, suckers and other fruity fare; I savored the Nestle Crunch bars, Kit Kats, Hershey bars, M&Ms, Milky Ways, Reese’s, 3 Musketeers, and Snickers- when my mom wasn’t trying to steal them and stash them in the freezer. My hands-down favorite chocolate candy: M&Ms. I eat a lot of them. I eat them often. As for how I eat them, that’s another post altogether.

My only question: Who decided that Halloween candy bars are “Fun Size?” If they were truly “Fun Size” they’d be the size of my laptop!

The Broadway Market

A Buffalo icon, the Broadway Market was THE place to get all of your fresh, homemade foods. Meat, baked goods, candy, horseradish, fish, flowers… you name it. The Broadway Market had it all. I use the past tense because while the building is still there and it is still in operation, it’s not the same market it used to be.

Steeped in old world Eastern European tradition, the Broadway Market was not just a shopping center, it was a cultural and social Mecca as well. Since Nan worked there- at Redlinski’s Meats- for what was probably close to 50 years, we had really close ties to the Market. You could buy pretty much anything there and I’m pretty sure Nan did. Redlinski’s sold anything meat. Not just kielbasa, but hot dogs, cold cuts, sausage and more. For an indulgent high-sodium treat, we’d opt for “TV snacks” as Nan called them. Later on, I found they had a real name: cabanossi. Whatever they were called, they were meaty, salty and completely addictive. Whenever anything came home from Redlinski’s, it was wrapped in the classic white butcher paper, taped with masking tape, and placed in their iconic red, white and blue plastic bag.

The Broadway Market teemed with Polish favorites. You could get placek, chrusciki (angel wings), and pastry hearts (elephant ears) from the bakeries. Fish for Christmas Eve dinner was, of course, from here. So were the mushrooms for the soup. They even have their own “famous” horseradish for your beef on weck. Easter time was really special thanks to the presence of the butter lamb. This Polish Easter classic was blessed in the Easter basket along with the rest of the meal fixings and graced our table every year. For those who don’t know, it’s a chunk of butter molded into the shape of a lamb. It has cloves for eyes, a red ribbon around its neck and a flag-on-a-toothpick sticking up from its tail. The best things about the butter lamb were being the first to start hacking into it and then seeing its poor shrinking little body amount to a head on a plate. (You always started at its hind quarters for some reason. Chopping its head off first seemed a little cruel.) 

Can't find the real deal down here, so this is the next best thing! (And it doesn't go bad...)

I’m sad to know that the Broadway Market is not the market I knew growing up. Fortunately, I found an amazing sausage purveyor in Orange County NY’s Black Region Dirt. Quaker Creek does it just like Paul Redlinski did all those years, but more detail will follow in a future post. Until then, thanks for the foodographic memories Broadway Market!

Polish Christmas

Christmas Eve always meant heading to my grandparents’ house in the Kaisertown neighborhood of Buffalo. We’d pile into the car, get to church early, and get a seat close to the back door so we could beat traffic out of the parking lot. Then it was a beeline to Nana and Poppa’s for dinner. Of course, being Buffalo, it was always cold. Often exceptionally so on Christmas Eve for some reason. However, their house was always toasty warm. All that cooking certainly helped. The oven and stove top were packed full of Polish goodness. If there were two stoves, they would have both been stuffed to capacity.

During my early years, the dinner crowd was quite extensive and included my great-grandmother (babci), great aunts and uncles, and various generations of cousins on my mother’s side. Many a folding chair made an appearance down the center of the “parlor.” Eventually it became a more intimate affair with just my parents, sister, grandmother and me, but I’m pretty sure we had just as much food for the five of us as we did for fifteen!

Polish Christmas Eve dinner fare, while not exactly the healthiest foods, is ridiculously comforting. Fish, pierogi, sauerkraut and mushroom soup are the staples. The fish and pierogi were fried, thus adding to their appeal. In fact, there was so much frying that I don’t recall a year when the smoke detector didn’t go off! Can you fry sauerkraut? Or soup? I’m pretty sure you can and my grandmother must have managed to find a way.

Back to the mushroom soup. Ask Don. It warrants its own paragraph. My mom grew up with this tradition and she never ate the soup. My sister and I never ate the soup. My dad, who married into the family, actually eats the soup. Before Don came with me for his first Christmas with my family, mom called to ask if he liked mushroom soup. Sure he did. What a weird question, he thought. Well, he never had Polish mushroom soup. To hear him tell the “story of the mushroom soup” never gets old. He never knew there would be specially imported mushrooms “the size of trees” in the soup. Not only that, he was basically bullied into adding heaping piles of mashed potatoes and sour cream to his bowl. “That’s the way we do it,” said Nan. So he did it, noticing that other than Nan, none of the other blood relatives ate the soup. Sucker! My sister’s boyfriend at the time didn’t eat the soup. Needless to say, he’s no longer in the picture. Hmmm… Eat the soup, welcome to the family!

It has been years since we’ve had the truly traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner. Nan kept up hosting duties for quite a while, even after Poppa died. Lately, my mom is continuing the tradition. She learned to make pierogi and passed the recipe along to me. However, I have yet to actually make them myself. There is a lot of history behind those pierogi and I don’t want to disappoint. Besides, I don’t have a smoke detector in my kitchen.