Bird + Seed

Pi[e] Day

Did you all observe the best-est holiday this past week?  No, I'm not talking Johnny Appleseed Day, although that was last week.  I'm talking Pi Day.  Always easy to remember the date of Pi Day...3.14 of course.  And how does one celebrate?  With pie, naturally.  We had mincemeat, key lime, chocolate pudding, vegetarian shepard's pie, mini-savory pies and my invention: goat cheesecake with balsamic strawberries.  All super delicious- our bellies were full.  So next time March 14th comes around the bend, don't neglect your pie-eating duty.  

Goat Cheesecake Pie with Strawberry Balsamic Topping

ingrediants
your favorite crust recipe.  [I used a basic flaky crust from The Pie & Pastry Bible]

for the pie:
12 ounces chevre
1/2 cup plain yogurt or creme fraiche
3 eggs
1/2-1 cup powdered sugar [depending on how sweet or how goat-ish you want it]
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt

for the topping:
~10 strawberries, cut in halves or quarters
1/3 cup balsamic vinegar
2 Tbsps cornstarch
1-3 Tbsps water

Blend all wet pie ingredients together in a food processor or stand mixer.  Slowly add powdered sugar and occaisionally taste to get the sweetness you want.  It still should be a bit tart and taste of goat cheese. Add baking powder and give one last pulse to blend.  Pour into partially pre-baked pie crust, and bake at 375 for ~45 minutes.  It will rise some and be mostly set except in the very middle, which will wiggle.  In the mean time, heat the strawberries with some water on the stove until they give up their juices.  Add the balsamic vinegar and heat through for a minute.  Slowly add cornstarch, being careful to avoid clumping.  Reduce heat and allow to thicken.  When pie is out of the oven and cooled for 20-30 minutes, spoon strawberries on top, arranging them in a single layer.  Allow to cool and set completely in the fridge.  If you can resist for that long...

 

Escape the Heat

Please excuse the lack of posts recently.  The heat has kept me far away from my computer and it's hot little keys.  And let's be frank, when you're sluggish and hot there isn't anything interesting enough in the whole wide world to stir you to blog.  Except an escape to the Cape [Cod]!  Our friend has a family house right on the tip, so across the bay we went.  Because summer Friday evening traffic is a mass exodus of the entire city we opted to forgo the drive and take the ferry!  We loaded our bikes up with bags and panniers and loaded ourselves onto the boat.  An hour and a half later we were in beautiful, old, gay Provincetown.  The actual first landing site of the Pilgrims before they made their more permanent settling across the bay in Plymouth.

We wheeled ourselves off the boat and then 8.5 miles along a dark and hilly seaside road to our destination where friends, food and drinks awaited.  I had never ridden Toulouse that far all at once before.  Sure, I ride at least 7 miles a day, but that is commuting in stop and go stressfull downtown traffic.  This was straight going- carrying stuff.  And hills.  Oh my the hills.  But we made it.  We really picked the best weekend to be there.  Even though 85 is really warm for the Cape, Boston was suffering through 105 degrees.  And when the ocean is just there, nothing really can go wrong.

There was plenty of widelife to spot.  We swam, and played wiffleball and frisbee.  We built sand castles.  I ran and spotted Damon while he swam a mile along the coast.  

And we picked pounds of wild blueberries on the hill behind the house.  What to do with them?  Muffins?  Coffee cake?  Unrelenting shoveling of berries straight into my mouth?  The answer is all three.  And with a huge freezer bag stashed away until January I will be savoring and remembering this trip for a while.

And how was your Memorial Day weekend?

Our good friends [who got married in this post] came back into town [from Quebec], toting their incrediably adorable and well behaved daughter with them.  

We had a great dinner at Beacon Street Tavern, played pass the baby, and decided that we all wanted to take her home.

- I sold my old bike [featured here] to a friend.  Yay!  Lola is off to a good home.

- We had dinner at Henrietta's Table.  It was our four year anniversary.  Damon made the comment that Henrietta's Table is a lot like yuppie Cracker Barrel.  That totally killed it for me.  Because it's true.

We beached it in Marblehead.  The sun finally peaked out and we both got pleasently brown.  

Over all, a really great weekend.  How was yours? 

Pi(e) Day

Did you mark the passing of yet another Pi(e) day?  No?  Well, maybe we'll get you next year.  Pi(e) day is [cutely enough] March 14th.  3.14.  Yeah, that sound familiar?  What better way to celebrate everyone's favorite mathmatical constant than with actual pie?  [Especially since it's impossible to celebrae e day...2.71... But we should be able to do Avogadro's Day! 6.02[x10^23]  I'm thinking lots of avocados for that celebration....]

Anyway, as the flag above attests, Pi(e) day is 3.14159 times better than a regular day.  Because we ate 3.14 times as much pie as say on... Thanksgiving.  [What?  no mashed potatoes to take up precious belly room for pie!]

We had spinach mushroom quiche, bean tortilla pie, key lime, pecan, apple crumble and I made a sweet potato maple pie.  All were sooooo good. And worth the tummy discomfort of the next day.  And I have actually not been tempted to dive into the nearly 1/2 pie still sitting in my fridge [for Damon who is away on a business trip].  Although once this sugar coma wheres off I might be.

Leaves! Plus, a garland

Damon, me, a friend of mine and his wife all went to the Belgian Beer Festival this weekend.  Yes, the beer was awesome.  But that is not the point of this post.  The point are these awesome printed leaves.  

They were everywhere outside the Cyclorama.  Partly out of excitement for the leaves, partly because we spent the last three hours drinking Belgian style beers- we ran around scooping them up.  I took a favorite home and got crafty.  

The leaves above are mostly from the park across from my apartment.  I dipped them in melted beeswax, which I picked up a while ago from the Food Co-op.  And then I 'artfully' arranged them with mini clothes pins [also something I've had in the craft box for forever] and voila!  A festive fall garland.

I have long thought that the wall above the TV was too bare.  But I was loathe to hang big picture frames up.  This seems like the perfect compromise.

I just hope they will last a while.  So many of the trees outside are bare- I want to hang on to fall beauty just a little while longer. 

Dosa Factory Lunch

A friend from college and fellow blogger Laura came up to Boston for the day.  She's doing a month-long rotation in Providence which is thankfully giving her plenty of opportunities to fall in love with New England.  To woo her to come to Boston for residency I tried to extol all the unique beauty of the PRC [People's Republic of Cambridge, that is].  It was a yucky rainy day, so the original plan of kayaking along the Charles was scrapped.  Instead we walked around Harvard Square [and discovered that a new Anthropologie opened up there just this past week...] And our lunch at the Dosa Factory was great.  Followed by ice cream [sorbet for me] at Toscanini's and a walk along the Charles.  It's amazing how easy it is to reconnect with old friends. 

  

Nacho Party- mine!

Sorry for the lame pun.  I'm in such need of a vacation.  And I'll be getting one!  I'm off to Montana until Wednesday to see The Boy.  But before that I had a little fun with some friends.  I threw a 'make your own Nachos' night.  Everyone brought fixings and we had quite the cheesy feast.  And for dessert?  Chocolate cake and port wine CA brought back with him the last time he went home to Portugal- so it was the real stuff.  Because nothing goes better with nachos than port wine...

Ok!  To bed I go... I have a 6am flight and I can never sleep on planes. 

A great dinner out

It was a great dinner out.

Not just because the food was great [mmm...naan]
Not just because it was a long day
Not just because it was with friends
And not just because I had a great groupon for this place.

But really, because halfway through the curries and rice we get a text.  Eric and Clemence had their baby, Lea.  The world has just become that much sweeter.
 

Holiday Treats

Handing out homemade treats is one of my favorite things around Christmas.  I don't like buying my friends gifts- I prefer to make them.  Like for my friend Sally, I usually make her jewelry.  For other friends, I bring in food.  Because as you know, there is no such thing as not enough food this time of year.  Although the snugness of my pants would seem to argue with that.  And handmade cards are one of my things.  I've made handmade cards for the past 4 years and well... have accrued quite the stash of papers and ribbons and stamps and the like [I mean, I'm a fairly respectable crafter... I should have a stash]  I decided to de-stash some of my paper goods and make cards from the bits.  Well, I had to buy something.  I bought a lovely pine cone stamp from NoraJane, who's cute stamps I've admired for a long time.  Using scrap paper I stamped a million pine cones, cut them out while watching The Closer [my parents had this show DVRed and I watched all the episodes they had while recuperating from the marathon.  I am now officially obsessed].  Some pine cones got glued to nice white paper, others got glued to gold paper cut into small tags.  With round edges!  GASP!  Another new purchase!  A corner punch.  I am in love with this corner punch!

Relatives got nice notes on the white cards.  Letters really, with a holiday theme.  And while my kitchen was turning out way too much sugar already, I made chocolate covered pretzels for friends & labmates.  Milk chocolate, dark chocolate, some with sprinkles, some with crushed peppermint.  Chocolate covered pretzels are just sooo easy.  And good.  A great gift.  I also made puppy chow.  You know the stuff.  Some people call is dirty snow, which is just an awful name.  So is puppy chow.  Two awful names for THE BEST SNACK IN THE WORLD.  Chex cereal + peanut butter + chocolate + powdered sugar.  I only make the stuff during Christmas and I immediately package most of it up to give to friends because I WILL eat it all if you leave me alone with a bowl of the stuff for 5 minutes.

I actually had some help.  Long time college friend/roommate Machi [not her real name] came to Boston for a few days for a residency interview at BU Med Center.  She was the chocolate & Chex stirrer.  After all the making and the packaging the letters went in the mail, The Boy guilt tripped me into sending him some [honey- don't put your Christmas present over a heat vent... it will melt] the rest got put into cute baggies and strapped to my bike basket.  Lola [my bike] loves to carry treats.  And I love to oblige her.

Whipping up a Wedding

Months ago when Eric proposed to Clemence I offered to make the wedding cake.  They were going to have a simple wedding, at our favorite bar, with our friend Luis presiding over the ceremony.  And I had dreams of fondant and tiers for the couple whom I have seen go from casual and timid dating, to a joyous and natural love, to pregnancy and moving in together.  And soon they would be gone as Eric accepted a professorship in Quebec.  Alas, winter weather and the thought of transporting a cake via bus or subway or cab deterred me from pursuing the whole wedding cake avenue.  But cupcakes would work.  The only problem was that I asked the [very] pregnant bride-to-be what kind of cake and she said [in a cute French accent] "Oh I love chocolate, and coffee, and blueberry.  Strawberry!  Yes, chocolate.  And oh!  Gingerbread.  Just not orange."  Ok...

So I settled on two cakes.  Gingerbread [cheated:  from a box from Trader Joes] and Devils Food.  For the toppings half of the gingerbread got butterscotch and half got cream cheese frosting.  The devils food was topped with Swiss Meringue butter cream or chocolate mousse.  All the recipes can be found in The Joy of Cooking.  Some where decorated with pink sugar hearts [I used a stencil cut from cardboard].  Some where rolled in coconut to look like snowballs.

Some had peppermint crumbles or pink sprinkles or swirly frosting.  But with all of that sugar and spoon licking I don't want to see sugar again for a while.  I have tons of confectionsers sugar and chocolate left over.  I'm hiding it.  And I threw out the left over frosting.  I don't need the temptation.  Also, I made on the same day holiday treats for friends and for lab [which I'll post later].  I never had a finished cupcake.  I'll be ok if I don't have cake again for a year.  Seriously.  For dinner just now I had steamed brocolli and an egg.

But it was really all worth it in the end.  Two of the cutest, most in love people in the world got married.  And they did it how they wanted, without breaking the bank, and in front of all of their friends.  I wish them all the best.  But I will not be making the cake for the baby shower.