Cooking and food related stuff

 {salted peanut butter cookies}

{vanilla ice cream sandwich}

 {Chinese supermarket}

{miso, sambal olelek, sesame oil, bok choy, kimchi, sprouts} 

 {roasted pears}

I use cooking as a distraction from school, bad weather, bad days at school, feeling lonely.
It's gone great so far; I did a handful of recipes, new recipes.

I have to admit I'm really psyched about this Chinese market located not to far from my home. I just feel a bit intimidated, cause they have loads of stuff and ingredients and I've been trying to narrow it down to a few recipes to do.

I've mostly been cooking recipes from one of my favorite blogs out there: Orangette. Molly, the writer is awesome. I mentioned her a while back, as she has a podcast I listen to now and used to listen massively at home in Iasi. Molly has a couple of recipes there, Asian inspired, and I gave those a try. I have no photos, cause I forgot to take any but be sure they were good looking and pretty delicious. The recipes are: Soba Noodles with Peanut-Citrus Sauce ( I did not use soba noodles because I'm not a big fan, at all. They are made of buckwheat flour and have a distinct smell and taste that I just think takes over. I used regular noodles from my Chinese store) and Kimchi Fried Rice, which was deliciously garlic-y. These recipes made a couple of servings so I was able to eat them several times on weeknights and did not have to cook every time a whole new thing.

I did this cookie recipe and these roasted pears last weekend. The cookies were good, I shared them around. People were pleased.
The pears deserve a whole new paragraph. Like seriously. They were just wonderful. If you have the chance I urge you to do them as soon as possible. I was planning to cook them on a day/weekend like this: cold, rainy, miserable. But instead I did them on a sunny and breezy afternoon and they were just as good. But imagine cooking them on a lousy, cold evening. We all know pears are hard and require a fair amount of chewing, but this way of cooking makes them like pudding, so soft, so vanilla-y, caramel-y and they will make you eat them all at once. I did ten halves/ five pears and they barely made it for me to eat them the second time. Next time I'll do more of them, and maybe share them, maybe.

{natas}

{ espresso shot}

{roasted chestnuts - pretty common here}

A bit on Portuguese food habits.
Given Portugal's location and all that stuff, I was expecting people here to be eating loads of fruit and vegetables, sea food ( they do, a lot) like it's sister Mediterranean countries: Spain, Italy. But they don't really. Not that much. I mean, they do have loads more exotic fruits and veggies and sometimes a trip to the supermarket can be an exciting adventure, but at least in the house I live and at the school canteen, people are eating fat, greasy foods. What is up with that?
From what I've seen at school, I've recognized a pattern. School courses start at 8-9-10 am and at 10-10.30 they take a brake - the professors and students also. They get coffee - (they drink these petite coffee shots with sugar, which I can't understand. They are really into their coffee) and maybe a pastry and they smoke a cigarette or two, do a bit of socializing.  Then they go back to their course and at 1 pm everybody stops what they're doing and they get lunch at the canteen(some bring their lunch from home and heat it up in the microwave). The break is an hour long. They eat - pretty slow, talk, have a coffee and maybe dessert at the end and then some more smoking. Then at 2 pm everybody gets on with some more classes. And this is what I find very difficult to do. There were times when I almost fell asleep in my chair. You just slump there and try to concentrate. It's hard to pay attention after the siesta you've had.
All in all, as you've noticed, I prefer cooking my own recipes rather than trying out their stuff. At least for now.

Quick check in

 

I'm grateful for many things. Here are a few.

 

 {great fall proof}

 {Pupi, being this fat while I'm feeding her a stick...}

 {this belly}

 {these eyes}

 {this tongue}

 {these jars, labeled by R}

 {the climbers/ adventurers}

 {blurred one}

 {photo-bombing my photo: still life with beer and access bracelets}

 {ooouups nightfall/scary situation at this point}

 {brainstorming ideas on how to get back in the city}

We did get to Hamak, eventually. Just a bit too late. Too late to fully enjoy the place. We got there in the afternoon and by the time we had all the straps on we were told to hurry up, cause they were closing the thing because it was getting dark. I chickened out for two reasons: they supposedly had no more gloves - and you do need them, like really. And two: they don't have one or two easier tracks to get the hang on things and warm up before they make you do the harder ones: yellow, blue and the deadliest of them all: red. So R and Adra managed to do the yellow and blue ones. I am proud of them. It really was difficult. But maybe that's just me. 

It's nice, into the woods, many things to do kind of place and has an Adventure Park. Just not that great of an adventure park. Certainly not like I experienced at Brasov.

Then we had half a beer and we were off to "the station", hoping to catch a ride home. We waited and waited but then it seemed hopeless, being Sunday evening and all. Then a woman with a car offered us a ride back and we were thrilled. And we got back safe and unraped, which is awsome. Adra even went on a date afterwards.

I baked cookies, brownie and a lemon yogurt cake for R's birthday today and I packed them and delivered them to his workplace, where he had a little get together with his mates. And they all liked everything very much, and I felt so proud...almost as if I had actually invented the recipes myself.
The recipes are here / here and here. The cookies are the ones I made for a party in May, check the post here.  And they're totally worth it, even if they're crazy expensive to make. The yogurt cake is a classic around here. I just swap the grapefruit with a lemon. The brownie is also an all time favourite.
I recommend trying any of them out. Mom bloggers of America know their shit.

fudge popsicles/ smitten kitchen

You need to try this today! It's so easy and the ingredients are all on hand. Minus the chocolate, probably. Just use good chocolate and good cocoa powder.
 What is there more to say? I'm already planning for a new batch for the next days.

Buttercream frosted chocolate cake

 {cake pans prepared}

 {cooling off}

 {wrapped to keep moist}

 {filling}

 {swiss buttercream}

{frosted and garnished with sprinkles}

  

It was my first ever go at baking a proper cake, with layers. I did a bit of documentation and ended up deciding on these two: layers / frosting. Both from Smitten Kitchen, of course. I tell you, this lady knows here stuff. I have tried a lot of her recipes because she just makes them seem so easy and uncomplicated. And will continue to do so.

First and foremost I finally went and bought two proper cake layer pans, 9 inch, 22-23 cm diameter. I had thought they were useless and that you could bake a perfectly good one single cake and slice it in half and fill it out, like I did a lot of times. But it's way easier with these around, less fuss and less of a chance of destroying the layers. I'm glad I did, and will now proceed to bake cakes more often and with all special occasions. Because why not?

The layers were easy to make, they turned out really intense because of the chocolate/coffee/cocoa powder combination and similar to a good brownie. Although I may, in the future, brush them off with a little simple syrup (water and sugar - boiled down) to get it a bit of moisture. For my 9 inch pans, Deb from smitten has a note there at the end of the Chocolate Cake Layers, where she tells you exactly the measurements for a 9 inch two layer cake, so I followed that, like I follow all her instructions exactly. It was perfect.

Frosting.

Of all of the frosting recipes I had considered making, this has the least amount of butter in it. 360 grams of butter. I know it already seems a lot, and it kind of is. But I really wanted a good/proper American frosting recipe. Standard American butter cream frosting s are made with powdered sugar and butter, whipped really good. But imagine how that must taste, like eating sweetened fat. I'm not OK with that. So you have to search well, and see what you'll go for. The frosting I tried from Deb has a meringue start up, from where you start adding the butter.

And adding I began. And I was a wreck and nervous the whole time and angry because at first it wouldn't work and it began to curdle. I considered throwing it away, but then as I gave it a last go with the mixer it magically turned the right consistency. I was amazed. I thought it was like magic, like this is so unpredictable, it could go any way it wanted to...

It is a rich frosting, even with the egg whites. It was tasty with the vanilla and all, but aside that it did not have much flavor to it. I want to make a semi-sweet chocolate buttercream frosting the next time. That surely has more flavor to it.

So I started frosting it and I did a decent job, I think... And added these sprinkles I found, but was not that happy about them. I swear I did not find any proper sprinkles anywhere. I would have loved to find some similar to these. Next time the search for proper sprinkles shall be thorough.

To wrap things up, this was a big, rich cake, just like Americans like it. Cut thin slices and enjoy little by little, spread a few slices to family and friends. I did and did not.

A list of Valentines' Day inspired desserts

- to try next year, and next, and next...

• chocolate hazelnut linzer hearts

image and recipe via Smitten Kitchen

• homemade snickers bars

 image and recipe via Not Without Salt

• churros and chocolate sauce

image and recipe via Cupcakes and cashmere

• chocolate eclairs

image and recipe via Joy of Baking

• chocolate mousse

image and recipe via Smitten, again

• Oreo fudge brownie

image from here / recipe here

birthday prepared

The happiest moment yesterday was having late lunch with my sister, eating two types of cake, sitting with R and her and talking. Watching her as she was telling pupi not to lick herself where she had stitches removed from her belly area + the fact that she was pleased with the so called gift we brought her.

 {lots of chocolate}

 {lots of chocolate + lots of butter}

 You will find the recipe here. I do love that blog.

 {cake - more like a brownie...}

 {inside this there was this book - it has an interesting cover, I think}

Besides baking, yesterday I got to clean our room a bit, organize my closet, washed loads of dishes, pack some stuff to leave at sis, because we ain't got the room for unnecessary stuff, got the washing machine going. I would say it was a productive day. I did not however get to read as much as I wanted. I'll catch up today. What I am reading is this. And it's good.