blueberry muffins

in my mom’s pretty cast iron muffin tin

turns out it’s impossible to find a recipe for whole-wheat muffins that uses butter (they all use applesauce or vegetable oil!)
http://www.recipezaar.com/recipe/100-Whole-Wheat-Blueberry-Muffins-632
I made this recipe but substituted one egg for the two whites (the egg was a light-blue one that came from our neighbor’s hens! Yum!) and 1/3 cup melted butter for the veg. oil. result is tasty but also gives the impression of being healthy.

Maine Maple Sunday

cauldrons of boiling maple sap steaming in the cold morning air

Sunday was Maine Maple Sunday, a day when all the maple farms open up their sugar shacks for visitors to come see the steamy maple-syrup-making process. They use taps and hoses to gather sap from lots of trees, and pour it all into a giant vat, then build a fire underneath and boil and boil and boil and boil until the watery sap cooks down into a concentrated, sticky, tasty syrup. It takes around 30 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup, and 1 cord of firewood to make 25 gallons of syrup! We went to visit a few neighborhood farms, Merrifield Farm in Gorham and Morin’s Maple Farm in Limerick, which is close to our new house in Limington. Our friend Paz came with us to visit Merrifield’s. Over the course of the day, we tasted pure shaved maple sugar, warm maple syrup on vanilla ice cream, maple cream on crackers, leaf-shaped maple sugar candies, and chocolate cupcakes with maple cream icing.

inside the steamy sugar shack

at Merrifield Farm in Gorham

a pail of sap, Paz and Mike

old maple syrup tins at Merrifield’s

Midge’s Ice Cream

just opened for the season!

This cute little place is right down the street from our house in Limington. Perfect for biking over there on a warm summer evening. We’ve driven past it a few times and I always think “I can’t wait til they open!” So as soon as we saw the lights on, we stopped in for a taste. I had a “moose on sugar,” that is, Moose Tracks ice cream on a sugar cone. I believe Midge herself took my order.

gingersnaps

I made gingersnaps for the first time! I used this recipe but also added fresh grated ginger, a bit of cayenne pepper (in hopes of a zingy gingery bite!) and orange zest. The result is delish, it does not have any gingery spiciness but it does have a bit of nice orange taste. Next time I will add more fresh ginger and cayenne! I like both the chewy ones (9 minutes in the oven) and the crispy ones (12 mins).

Cuzco part 2

Mercado Municipal in Cuzco, Peru. Every town and city we’ve visited has its own version of the public market, which is like a farmer’s market, the supermarket, the butcher, and the dollar store, all rolled into one, plus they have rows of lunch counters that serve hot and tasty homemade soups and cheap meals. The variety of merchandise is amazing and overwhelming! This place also had tailors, stalls that sell fabrics and notions, and lots of fancy traditional costumes for sale.

On our last day in town, we happened to wander off into the “other” Cuzco, that is, the less touristy side of town where the locals hang out. It was a totally different story! We poked around the Mercado Municipal, a big colorful public market just like the ones we’ve visited in almost every town along our trip – but this one was the biggest, and filled with tantalizing arroz chaufa and other favorite peruvian dishes on offer at the lunch counters.

a plethora of juice vendors!

pig head for sale

Beyond the market, we found a maze of smaller markets and shops, streets filled with vendors, etc… It was great to see a livelier and more genuine side to the city.

busy streets behind the Mercado Municipal in Cuzco

baby chickens for sale

Pumpkin Squares?

Because it’s both summer and Christmas, and because I was feeling too hot and lazy to make a proper pumpkin pie, I am currently conducting an experiment: Easy, summery lemon squares plus festive pumpkin pie equals Pumpkin Squares! I used the crust from this lemon square recipe (which I baked up last week with delicious results), and then made up this pumpkin pie filling (more or less) and the hybrid Pumpkin Squares are in the oven now. After dinner I will report back on the results.

results: awesome. this is super delicious. The pumpkin filling itself is not the tastiest ever, it’s a little bit eggy and I guess it could’ve used more spices (or perhaps it’s just because i used a butternut squash instead of a pumpkin – proper pumpkins don’t exist in argentina!) Anyway the whole concept was a success and the result was pretty good.

pad thai noodles

and Tom Yum. delicious!!!

http://www.thaitable.com/Thai/recipes/Pad_Thai.htm

http://www.thaitable.com/Thai/recipes/Tom_Yum_Goong.htm

korean food!

For years we’ve been talking about going out to Flores (a slightly-off-the-beaten-track barrio of Buenos Aires) and searching for Korean food. Apparently there’s been a Korean community in Flores for decades, but it isn’t a touristy destination like Chinatown; it’s totally the opposite. Most of the restaurants are not well marked, most of the neighborhood’s signage is only in Korean, and we heard that outsiders are not overly welcome and restaurant owners are reluctant to unlock their doors for non-Koreans (in Buenos Aires most restaurants are locked and you have to ring a doorbell to be let in). Apparently there is a notoriously impoverished and dangerous shanty-town right next to the Korean neighborhood, which means it’s not the safest area to go wandering around aimlessly. Additionally, it’s a long-ish trip to get out there and we didn’t even know exactly where to go, so it’s been hard to get motivated to make the trip out there, knowing that we might never find a restaurant, or might get turned away hungry. Then a few weeks ago my friend Heather mentioned she’d had a good meal in Koreatown and gave me some directions for how to get there.

So, Saturday morning we did a bit of online research (see helpful links below) and we set out with high hopes and only a bit of apprehension. It turned out to be an easy and DELICIOUS trip! We took the A line of the subte (blue line) out to the end of the line, the Carabobo stop. We walked down Carabobo towards the autopista 25 de Mayo and crossed under the highway, and soon started seeing signs in Korean and a few restaurants with their doors open! The neighborhood was definitely quiet and felt kind of deserted, but there were delicious lunchtime smells wafting about. We ended up at Han Gu Kuan, 2135 Saraza just around the corner from Carabobo. The old guy at the door gave us a bit of stink-eye (perhaps because we arrived at 2:00, which is a bit late for lunchtime) but he let us in, and the friendly waiter immediately started bringing us food! They have a set menu, which makes it easy, no decisions to make! We started out with a bowl of medium-spicy soup with tofu, then came a plate of deep-fried sweet potatoes, a small iceberg-lettuce salad, a platter of delicious rice noodles with beef and shredded veggies, and the usual huge array of small dishes with kimchi and Korean tapas-style snacks: eggy potato salad, fried fish, spicy bean sprouts, VERY spicy watercress salad, mysterious fishy things and oniony things and savory things and spicy things, plus a large bowl of cold, cloudy liquid with slices of giant-radish-like things in it. I probably should know what that was but I have no idea. THEN arrived the MOUNTAIN of marinated beef! I honestly think they gave us lunch for 4 people, even though we were just two. There was SO much food and a WEALTH of beef. They put a bucket of hot coals into our tabletop grill and we spread our own raw beef strips on there and it was SO DELICIOUS! the other Korean restaurants we’ve been to in Buenos Aires gave small portions of beef Gulgogi and we always leave wanting more beef! This time it was difficult to finish all the beef, but it was so so so delicious we managed to eat it all. Finally, they brought a few mandarin oranges for dessert. All this, along with a half-liter of Quilmes beer and a huge bottle of Sprite, turned out to cost $100 pesos even. Not terribly cheap, but totally worth it. We kind of had the feeling that we got the old “Gringo Tax” (that is, the same meal would’ve cost less if we were locals!) but it was still a great deal. I really want to go back again, like, tomorrow! I could totally see myself going back every single weekend, it was soooooooo good. Definitely even better than Bi-Won, which was previously our favorite Korean place in Buenos Aires.

here are a few relevant links we came across:
http://randompanda.blogspot.com/2008/08/korea-town-barrio-coreano.html
http://www.saltshaker.net/20060128/protection-of-the-cabbage
http://www.tableconversation.com/2008/09/korean-food-in.html

We were advised that Avenida Castañares is the avenue that divides the Barrio Coreano from the nearby villa, so one might want to think twice before wandering further in this direction.

cooking class

for my birthday present, Mike gave me a vietnamese cooking class! it was fun and delicious!! we made sweet potato fritters, spicy sweet dipping sauce, pho (that’s the delicious beef noodle soup), and coconut sticky rice.

YUM. I will definitely use these recipes in the future!

holy moly! whoopie pies!

I grew up on whoopie pies and they’re one of the top snacks I look forward to eating when I go back to Maine for a visit. (along with lobster rolls and Italians!) I was surprised to find that nobody in New York had ever heard of them… it turned out they were just a Maine thing. Until today, when I read in the New York Times that whoopie pies are suddenly popular all across the country.

“The whoopie pie would probably be Maine’s state dessert, if the state had one.” When my out-of-state friends visited came to visit Maine with me, I was always excited to introduce them to whoopie pies but had to remember to explain that you’d better not try to consume a full-sized whoopie pie in one sitting…
Here’s the article: New York Times whoopie pie article