Sporking it Up

Another fantastic collaboration is underway! I have joined forces with Silver Spork News to write about food, huzzah! Silver Spork is a food website created by some alums from NYU. I think it's pretty awesome, and I'm super excited to start writing.

Here's my first article, which is about my fav challah bread recipe.

Dreamy Honey Challah Bread

Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book

This cookbook is fast becoming one of my favorites. Written by Emily and Melissa Elsen, the two sisters who started and run the Four and Twenty Blackbirds pie shop, this great collection showcases and breaks down the slices that can be found daily in the Brooklyn-based shop. 

With rustic fruit, nut, and custard pies that look as flaky and crumbly as anything, this book is as inspiring as it is accessible. The beauty here is in the baking; in the mess, the splatters, and the raw ingredients. There are 70 pages of basic techniques with instructional photos to match, which cover things like how to make all-butter crusts, pistachio creams, and shaving chocolate. 

It puts a great deal of focus on where the ingredients are sourced from, emphasizing local suppliers. Because of this, the recipes are organized by season, and each pie is a reflection of the ingredients best available at the time. This leads to some creative and interesting flavor combinations, such as Chamomile Lavender, Salty Honey, Grapefruit Custard Pie, and Lemon Verbena Raspberry Galette.

Not only do the pies look fantastic, they are simple,  imperfect, and they make you want to start baking right then and there. I'd really like to take a trip out to the pie shop and try the real stuff. Until then, I guess I'll settle on making my own.

Good pie book? Great pie book. 

Hyde Park, Victory and Albert, and Tea and Tattle

All of the travel writing I've been doing of New York has made me look back at all the photos from England and Cambridge. I can't believe it's almost a year since I stayed there for one summer. I miss all of the places and people, and of course, all the frickin' tea. 

One weekend, I decided I really wanted to see the Victory and Albert Museum, and Hyde Park. Thanks to my recent devotion to Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway, Hyde Park seemed like a very appealing spot to visit. 

 It really didn't disappoint.

So after my stroll through the rose garden and lunch along the Serpentine, I headed over to the museum. 

It also didn't disappoint.

I love wandering around new cities, and sometimes these are trips best to take by yourself. After ogling at all the dresses, jewels, and paintings in the V&A, I wondered around a bit until I hit a cute tea shop called Tea and Tattle.

I can't emphasize enough just how freaking cute this place is. 

A Victoria sponge cake stuffed with raspberry jam and cream, and a pot of peppermint tea.

I know. It's so freaking British. 

I miss it so much. 

New York & Shake Shack Burgers

A quick trip across the Brooklyn Bridge landed my roommates and I in the spot of green that is Brooklyn Bridge Park. After the long walk, a bit of spontaneous Shakespeare, and 45+ photographs, we were pretty hungry. Savvy tourists and locals alike flock around the base of the bridge for some of New York's best pizza at Grimauldi's.
So where did we hit up for grub?

Shake Shack, of course.

With a wait time of a whopping 15 minutes, over the estimated 2-hours for NO SLICE, CASH ONLY pizza, those patties and crinkle-cut fries looked pretty damn good. Plus the view was hard to beat.

 

When we think of food, we often consider the calories or ingredients or bake or type, and yeah that's what it is I guess, but what makes for good eating, is often comprised of so much more than the food. It's time and place and people and love. That's why we like it yeah? That's why I do.

Sylvia Plath and Mille-Feuille

Mille-fuille. As layered, delicate, and confusing as a Sylvia Plath poem. 

Now poetry has never been a forte of mine, try as I might. I consider myself a very distant admirer. I love to hear the words, and I love how they flow down the page, but for some reason I've never been particular good at grasping their structure, their meaning, what makes them great and awful at the same time. Plath's novel The Bell Jar, spoke to me intimately, but whenever I try to dive into Ariel, I'm left baffled, but utterly satisfied.

Mille-feuille is my food equivalent. I had it recently in a small patisserie in Greenwich, by which I mean, I hunted it down because I wanted one so badly. Sometimes, the mood strikes like that.
A precarious tower of puff pastry and creme patissiere, Mille-feuille is a feat of pastry engineering. Try as I might, I am stumped at how to tuck into it. As soon I crack into the top or sides, gobs of pastry cream ooze out in an almost mocking and unapologetic way. As tricky as it is to eat, I still crave it so much, that I'm willing to embarrass myself in public by trying to balance each flakey layer onto my fork and into my mouth. 

Of course Bon Appetit, as usual, has read my mind, and got the full scoop on the classic French pastry from one of the best pastry chefs in the world. They, too, seem to appreciate the subtle majesty and absurdity that is the mille-feuille. But apart from its varied history, apparent trendiness, and all around deliciousness, I consider it a great example of something you just enjoy, and hope to understand in time. 

I can't pronounce you, but damn it if I don't I respect you. 

The Couriers 

The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf?
It is not mine. Do not accept it.

Acetic acid in a sealed tin?
Do not accept it. It is not genuine.

A ring of gold with the sun in it?
Lies. Lies and a grief.

Frost on a leaf, the immaculate
Cauldron, talking and crackling

All to itself on the top of each
Of nine black Alps.

A disturbance in mirrors,
The sea shattering its grey one ----

Love, love, my season.

Sylvia Plath