Tasting the District

I love that on the weekends

mmy home becomes a test kitchen, with ingredients on hand to make almost anything I have a hankering for.

On the docket today is a champagne sorbet, attempt 2 at macrons ( this time lime scented sandwiched with homemade lime curd) and a couple other as yet undecided cookies for an ice cream sandwich party on valentine’s day.

That doesn’t include the myriad cocktail experiments G has been attempting with his new muddler and cocktail stirrer.

America’s Test Kitchen, I’m giving you a run for your money!

Culinary Class crawl!

This sounds like probably the coolest way to spend a Sunday! Several restaurants along Barracks Row will be opening their kitchens for classes.

I’m thinking maybe the pizza class at Matchbox, definitely the Indian food class, and the Belgian class at Belga cafe! Ohmygoodness!

Jodi are you wtih me?!

The other night I made myself a lovely dinner, based off of this cauliflower “steak” recipe. Instead of harissa, I used a dollop of hummus and a spoonful of fresh salsa (that delicious kind from Trader Joe’s). It was a simple meal, but oh so satisfying and delicious, and all I wanted to do was tell everyone about it!

I made myself giggle, because really… I want to tell everyone about nearly every meal I eat. My first thought is to post it as a facebook status, or maybe let my email chain now…. This is the very behavior everyone mocks social media for!

“who cares what someone ate for breakfast” is almost always the refrain when putting down sites like twitter and facebook.

But the simple fact is, I do! and I love to share it, and judging by the likes I get, people like knowing when I make delicious things!

I’m not really sure what this post is about except for me stating the obvious fact… I love talking about food!

One other thing that’s burning a hole in my brain: I just got an almost lovely lunch form a halal food truck, chickpeas, ground lamb, chicken, perfect rice…. except they smothered everything in a white creamy sauce that was just awful, frustrating really. So dear halal food truck guy, lay off the sauce!

and that’s all folks!

This past Sunday we took a trip down to the fish market on the Potomac in search of shrimp and jumbo scallops. If you haven’t ever been I encourage you to! It’s quite the scene, with loud music, lots of fisherman yelling for your attention and people eating fried shrimp and oysters.

Fish is much cheaper down on the warf than at many of the grocery stores, and much cheaper, we were able to get a 1/4 lb of large shirmp (about 10) and 1/4 lb of jumbo sea scallops (6) for $12. After staring at all that fish, we couldn’t resist buying a bunch of fried shrimp and eating them by the water. So delicious people go there and eat fried shrimp now!

Anyway, we grabbed linguini, spinach, and tons of meyer lemons (I’ve been dying to try them after reading so much about them lately) at Whole Foods and a couple of days later made our meal. (the fried shrimp filled us up too much Sunday night). I’ve never cooked scallops or shrimp before so I was pretty nervous to time everything correctly. All I know is that scallops cook quickly, and it’s tough to get them just right! I had Germaine handle the dirty work of shelling the shrimp while I hovered over the scallops (which ended up under done sadly.) We mixed linguini with some sautéed spinach and garlic, grated some lemon zest and Parmesan Reggiano tossed the shrimp, which I simply sautéed in butter together with some sea salt, cracked black pepper and chili powder and voil’a! It was pretty delicious, though we all decided more butter would be good in the future.

Germaine just got the new ipod nano, which comes with a video camera and we video taped the whole messy process, should be online soon, so stay tuned!

Tonights baking efforts turned into quite the adventure. While my whipped cream turned out lovely ( though I did resort to a mixer when my wrist got too tired) and the pecan pie also looks quite lovely, my pumpkin pie is a bit of a disaster.

I filled the pie a bit too full, and had pie crust and pumpkin spilling all over the oven, hopefully it’ll still taste good, even though there isn’t much of a flaky gold crust :(

I’ve so far made it out with only one burn on my finger, let’s see how many more I get tomorrow!