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So You Wanna Be a Chef— by Bourdain

So You Wanna Be a Chef<br/>— by Bourdain

Lemonade

Lemonade sounded good for some reason today, so I picked up some lemons and made some fresh lemonade.

How I made it:

Simple syrup

1 cup of water
1 cup of sugar

Combine the water and sugar in a saucepan, heat and stir until sugar is dissolved. Set aside to cool.

Juice 4 to 6 lemons to get 1 cup of fresh lemon juice. Strain out seeds.

Combine simple syrup, 1 cup lemon juice and 3 to 4 cups chilled water. Add ice and lemon slices if desired. If this is not tart enough for you, adjust it by adding more lemon juice.
Enjoy!

Cool Cafeterias: The New Wave of School Lunch

Cool Cafeterias: The New Wave of School Lunch

Chicken soup for may sick baby

Ok, She's not my baby anymore - she's 11 going on 25, but she's my first and she'll always be my baby' and she was sick this week.  So what do I do?  I go to work fixing food to cure her - specifically, chicken soup and fruit salad and homemade bread. 
I'm in my new house and a new kitchen, and things are still in boxes, but I have my Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day book, and my recipe book holder out and ready to go.

The first thing I did was put together some bread dough so that I could fry up some naan to dip in the soup.  One of Cordelia's favorite things in the world in naan - I figured she could use some good comfort food.

Then I started in on the chicken stock. Which included:
1 5lb chicken
1 1/2 white onions quartered
1 turnip - halved
2 carrots, cut in chunks
3 ribs celery, cut in chunks
a handful of flat leaf parsley
a bunch of fresh thyme
1 whole head of garlic, halved
1 tsp peppercorns
1 tbsp kosher salt
1/2 inch fresh peeled ginger
6 whole allspice
1/2 tsp dried dill
enough water to just cover it all.
I boiled all of this for 1 and a half hours. 

And ended up with this

In the mean time, I threw this together:

Fruit is always good for a cold - and my youngest LOVES her fruit.
Then I put the soup together.

The soup included all of the stock I had made and:
2 tbsp olive oil to saute' (for about 6 minutes)
1 medium onion
3 cloves of minced garlic
2 medium chopped carrots
2 chopped celery ribs
2 sprigs of fresh thyme
I then put in my stock and cooked  the veggies for about 5 minutes then added thin egg noodles that I got from the Jewish food section of Safeway and cooked those for 10 minutes.  Then I stirred in the chicken meat I had stripped and shredded from the whole chicken I had cooked in the stock earlier. I then put in a handful of chopped flat leaf parsley and I tossed in some kosher salt and fresh ground pepper to taste.  And this is what I ended up with:

It was delicious and enough for about 12 people - The girls LOVED it especially with warm naan right out of the skillet to dip in the soup.  I ended up with enough for lunch for a couple of days, fed a couple friends at work with it, and have some saved for my love when he comes out to see me for Christmas in December.  I hope it's still good when he gets here, I know my Okiefied friend said it was the best chicken soup she ever had.  That was quite a complement. 

Lunch at Loleta Bakery

My girls and I had a wonderful lunch at the Loleta Bakery last weekend. White chocolate mocha, blue cheese and walnut pizzetta and a bowl of lamb kofta soup and a half pastrami sandwich, with bread made fresh that morning.

Oh, and the freshest salad on the planet!  I'm pretty sure fresh locally grown lettuce, picked that day.

Time-Lapse of 1200 lbs. of Cheese Carved

That's a whole lot of cheese!