Apple, Cinnamon, & Nutmeg Spiced Pancakes

Continuing on the pancake route I decided to alter the Krusteaz mix yet again, this time by adding cinnamon, nutmeg, & apple pie spice to the mix. Results were ... well I'll definitely be doing this again.. Repeatedly. Although I'll probably use more cinnamon next time!

Apple Pancakes

For the first 2-3 years after my return to Boston I was pretty obsessed with pancakes. During those years I probably made somewhere around 500 pancakes (measured by the number of 10 lbs pancake bags we went through). I made a myriad of varieties, such as chocolate chip, banana, strawberry, and blueberry. I even got a bit fancy, making peanut butter & Nutella stuffed pancakes and a PB&J pancake sandwich (both of which were crazy delicious). I never, however, altered the mix. I always used simple, basic Krusteaz.

Let me be the first to say that there is NOTHING wrong with Krusteaz; in fact it's amazing. With the right amount of water (I have no idea how much water they recommend, I just go by feel at this point) it makes a light, fluffy, delicious canvas for maple syrup. I was about to make pancakes for myself one morning and I had the insane/brilliant idea to replace the water with blended apple (used 1/4 apple for 2 small pancakes). Now, some people will ask me why not just cut up the apple and put it into the pancake like I would with a banana. No. That would be all messed up texture wise. Gross. No thank you. I used my Vitamix to be certain there were no surprise chunks waiting mid pancake.

What I ended up with was a light, fluffy, delicious pancake with the exact same texture as a normal pancake that had a fantastic apple flavor to it. Yum!

Eggs Benedict continued

I'm still obsessed with my discovery of Sri Racha hollandaise and look for pretty much any excuse I can to make it. Dad has never had eggs Benedict before? Eggs Benny w/ Sri Racha hollandaise. Girlfriend leaving for London? Eggs Benny w/ Sri Racha hollandaise.

There are two differences for this rendition of Eggs Benedict... the hollandaise also had sea salt and paprika in it and the English muffins were fried in bacon fat (omgbaconfat 10/10 would do again).

Cinnamon french toast with a cream cheese glaze

List articles, generally speaking, are annoying; they're a cheap way to draw you in by making their pointless, mundane content seem more exciting. A very quick search on Buzzfeed's front page yielded several such articles, chief among with was "9 videos you can't miss this week". I can miss them, and I will, thank you.

Rant over, there are some list articles that are super awesome. The same quick search on Buzzfeed took me to "17 Ways To Eat More Nutella" and "27 Ways To Experience The Holy Matrimony Of Peanut Butter And Chocolate". These are obviously good things and make their list article nature tolerable. A couple weeks back my sister sent me the article "31 Life-Changing Ways To Eat French Toast". Now, when I see an article title like this I'm imagining people eating french toast while doing a split between two trucks moving backwards at ~30mph. Stupid title aside, the article had some awesome ideas for french toast variations such as Nutella and bacon stuffed french toast, caramel apple french toast, cannoli stuffed french toast, and cinnamon french toast with cream cheese glaze. Last weekend I recreated the latter and dayumn it was good. Quick question, is it playing with your food if you do it before you eat? SMILEY FACE!

Because the article has a link to the recipe I won't bore you with it here, but damn it was tasty. The cream cheese glaze had cinnamon and nutmeg and was bonkers. Yep, bonkers.

To go with the french toast I did scrambled eggs with aged cheddar and pan fried maple breakfast sausages from Walden Local Meat Co. If you're actually reading this terrible blog and haven't seen my post about them, I'd suggest you check it out. They're awesome and you should support them.

Grilled Cheese continued!

A few posts ago I wrote about making a apple-cheddar-bacon-egg-caramelized shallot gourmet grilled cheese. Aside from blowing my mind, it taught me that a grilled cheese is an awesome format for creative deliciousness that has to be explored further. Since then I've made two more... aside from the innards, the biggest difference is that I've fried these in the bacon fat from  said bacon. The first picture is cheddar, guacamole and bacon grilled cheese while the second is cheddar, avocado, heirloom tomato and bacon.

Also, it should be noted that I kind of cheat when it comes to grilled cheese making. This is how I guarantee that the cheese is nice and melted:

Ivy Championships and Nutella stuffed chocolate glazed doughnuts

A few weeks ago the Ivy Championships were held at Harvard so a bunch of my fellow Brown alumni were in town to watch. They came over for brunch and I decided to use them as guinea pigs for the Nutella stuffed chocolate glazed doughnuts I've been wanting to make. I was overconfident with my memory of the dough making process and messed it up pretty badly, but the concept totally worked. When I finally do this again and make the dough properly they're going to be aaammmaaazzziiinnngggg!

By the way, I did these by making the dough, rolling it about twice as thin as normal, applying Nutella to the center of the doughnut, putting two halves together and using water to create a seal of doughnut dough around the Nutella stuffing.

Walden Local Meat Co.

I don't understand all the fuss about companies like Facebook and Google saving data about us. If it means that they're able to use said data to provide targeted advertisements for things that will add value to my life I'm one happy camper. Facebook really knocked the ball out of the park by showing me an add for Walden Local Meat Co. In a nutshell Walden Local Meat Co.'s business is to deliver a monthly allocation of locally sourced grass fed meats right to your door. I got my first delivery earlier this week and have included a photo of the bounty below (I'm paying for 6 lbs monthly and received 7.5!). They also send you a cute little book with recipes and a thermometer. By the way, their customer services is phenomenal. Before signing up I had a few questions; they responded almost immediately with detailed and helpful answers.

2 x beef short ribs, 2 x country style pork ribs, 1 x maple breakfast sausages, 1 x ground beef.

For the first meal using Walden's meat I invited my sister over for some pork ribs. The book suggested slow cooking them in barbecue sauce, so I decided to cook them sous vide in a bag filled with Stubb's Smokey Mesquite sauce. We used this because it was 1) in our fridge and 2) didn't have high fructose corn syrup in it. The end result was actually really nice, the meat had a very nice smokey bbq flavor. Instead of using more sauce we simpy put the leftover sauce and juices from the sous vide bag in a bowl for dipping.



One of the sides was oven browned potatoes and sweet potatoes. In the spirit of going full fat kid I tossed them in bacon grease which unsurprisingly made whole house smelled like bacon. And the potatoes ended up with a really nice hint of bacon flavor. Yum!

Our other side was a mixed green salad with pear, gorgonzola, pecan and a savory fig vinagrette that my sister made. It was delicious.