Tuesdays with Dorie: Parisian Apple Tartlet

I don't really think this could be any easier. Puff pastry + fruit + butter + sugar. Yum. I used Pepperidge Farm puff pastry shells, which I just happened to have in the freezer. I subbed peaches for the apples because I picked up some great peaches at the Memphis Farmer's Market Saturday (saving some for the Honey Peach ice cream). Super simple dessert and it tasted great. I put a few scoops of Ben & Jerry's Mission to Marzipan on the side. Delish. Thanks to Jessica of My Baking Heart for this week's selection.

Things I'm crushing on right this minute

• Little wooden chair we picked up at an estate sale a few weeks ago, $45. It's a little creaky but I think Doug can tighten the joints. Once I saw the seat cushion with the koi I had to have it.

• Bon Iver

• Snowglobe

• Haagen Dazs Five coffee flavor - best ice cream ever. EVER.

• Malabrigo Organic Cotton - I ordered two sweaters worth from Yarnzilla (it was on sale). I'm making the Ophelia cardigan from A Mingled Yarn, that's the very beginning of it. This colorway is Plata and it's gray with faint blue undertones. It was a little stiff but as I'm knitting with it it's softening up a bit.

• Savage Love podcasts, he's kind of fabulous. However be warned, he is not for the faint of heart. Or ears.

• Stitcher Radio app for my iPhone, I can listen to NPR shows like Car Talk, Fresh Air, etc. while I water the garden and get eaten by mosquitoes. If Doug could marry this app he would, mainly because he can listen to NBC Nightly News, 60 Minutes and Face the Nation.

• Raspberry Buttermilk Cake from Smitten Kitchen via Gourmet, seriously I made this last weekend and it was gone almost instantly. And there was only two of us.

• Posie Gets Cozy, I've been a blog stalker of hers for awhile but her posts about her garden and the accompanying pictures make me want to move to Portland immediately.

• Handknit socks from my super-fabulous friend Lynsey. She's out of town for awhile and I miss her lots. She made these socks in honor of me learning how to ride a bike! (more about that later).

Tuesdays with Dorie: Cinnamon Squares

Okay this recipe had me a little skeptical. Not because of the cinnamon + chocolate factor, because I'm down with that. No, it was the cinnamon + chocolate + instant espresso factor, I wasn't sure how that would work out. I was very pleasantly surprised. This was really good. I loved that I didn't have to drag my mixer out (even though I love it). The batter was simple and mixed by hand. I did forget to follow the direction about folding the butter in lastly and with a light touch. I just threw all the wet ingredients together and then added them to the dry mixture, oops. It didn't seem to impact the final product though.After the batter was 'smooth and satiny' and added a layer of it to the 8 x 8 pan and then sprinkled the chopped up chocolate and the cinnamon/sugar/instant espresso mixture on top before added the second and final layer of batter. It went into the oven for around 40 minutes, until the toothpick came out clean. It smelled really, really good. And I found myself eating bit of the trimmed edges before it was cool. I should have never doubted Dorie, because these squares were amazing, even without the frosting. After it all cooled down, I chopped more chocolate (is it just me or does it seems like we chop chocolate every week?) and made the frosting, which was just butter and semi-sweet chocolate. This was an excellent recipe, I love the cinnamon + chocolate flavors and I didn't really notice the espresso granules at all. The middle cinnamon/sugar layer adds a nice element of sweet and spicy crunch. I used Saigon Cinnamon from Penzey's and it was very good. Consequently upon Google-ing Saigon Cinnamon I found out that "Saigon cinnamon has 1-5% essential oil in content and 25% cinnamaldehyde in essential oil, which is the highest of all the cinnamon species". So it's extra cinnamon-y I guess. All in all another great Dorie recipe. Thanks to Tracey of Tracey's Culinary Adventures for this week's selection!

I grow things

So this is where we're at with the garden right now:

-Purple Peruvian & La Ratte potatoes from Seed Savers are growing every second I think. I have to go find straw to layer over them. Have to get on that like immediately. -Purple pole beans from Seed Savers are growing up the trellis Doug made, they're also growing by leaps and bounds.-I found what appears to be a baby eggplant on the vine, crossing my fingers it matures into a normal-sized eggplant. All the eggplant came as plants.-Tomatoes are all getting bigger, noticed a few buds on them too. I didn't start any tomatoes from seed this year, all are heirlooms from a few different local nurseries/farms.

-I have *tons* of peppers, all kinds of varieties too. These are Serrano and they should be mature in a couple of weeks. Also waiting on the pimentos to get big so I can make homemade pimento & cheese for Doug.-Really disappointed with the carrots/lettuce I planted from seed. It looks like hardly any of the seeds germinated. I'm trying to decide if I should wait and see or just pull out what's in there and plant something else. I had success with a different variety of carrots last year so many it's just the variety?

-Cucumbers (from seed) are taking off, I expect to have a bumper crop of cukes.-Butternut squash from seed is also growing well, hoping to have a better outcome with it this year than I did last. -I have one empty bed and one bed yet to be built. I ordered some pumpkin seeds from High Mowing Organic Seeds, even though it's probably a little late to plant them. One is a pie variety and the other is decorative kind. We'll see how it pans out.

Despite the fact that its already hot and humid outside and every time I go to water the garden the mosquitoes think I'm an all-you-can-eat buffet I still love growing food. Especially from seed - knowing that something that's on my dinner plate was once a little seed sent to me in the mail is always thrilling. Plus there's the added security of knowing exactly where my tomato has come from, not Mexico, not a hothouse somewhere, but from my own little patch of land. I know everything I put into that soil and everything I didn't (like insecticides and chemicals). Like I've said before I grew up in the grand traditions of vegetable gardens and fruit trees and chickens and beekeeping. Some of the best memories I have are of visiting my great-grandparents and picking hot, juicy strawberries right off the vine, getting lost in the tall stalks of corn in their garden (they always made my legs itch), spending hot summer afternoon shelling peas on the backporch while my fingers turned purple and listening to the roosters crow in the morning. It's happy.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Chipster-Topped Brownies

Isn't this someone's dream recipe? A layer of fudgy brownies topped with a layer of chocolate chip cookie dough? This is like the answer to your worst day ever, come home and devour one of these and a scoop of vanilla ice cream and have all your worries melt away. The base of these were brownies made with bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate, a la Dorie's French Chocolate Brownies. I omitted the walnuts because the pantry was bare of them. Also I made the brownie layer first and stuck it in the oven for 12 minutes or so before I added the cookie layer. The brownie base alone would have been fine but the addition of the cookie dough made it sublime.

Dorie's instructions call for you to dollop the cookie dough over the top of the brownies and then lightly spread it across. This was the part I had problems with. The cookie dough kind of sunk into the brownies and didn't want to be spread. I stuck the whole thing into the oven hoping a few minutes in there would make the cookie dough easier to spread but all it did was melt the chocolate chips and smear them across the dough. So I gave up and figured they would still taste good. And my yes did they. Even though they weren't quite what I pictured they were still REALLY, REALLY good. Decadent. I wish I had a picture to show you but they were distributed to friends and they were gone within a matter of hours and all I had left were crumbs. Thank you to Beth of Supplicious for this selection. So.good.

More pictures than words

I've fallen down on the job of posting. I have things to say, just not enough time to say them. Also I skipped out on TWD this week. The selection was Mango Bread and I just wasn't feeling it.
Until I have time to write out more coherent thoughts here are some pictures to distract you.

Lovely egg cups (a birthday gift, lucky me!) from my sweet friend Melissa. The giant eraser was .25 cents at an estate sale last weekend, a vintage copy of my favorite book ever "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" - $1.00 at an estate sale down the street from me two weekends ago and another vintage book - a Nancy Drew book I've had forever. My mom brought it to me Mother's Day weekend, my great-uncle sent me that book when I was a tween and really into Nancy Drew. A little collection of things I'm starting on the living room wall. I bought the 'B' at a big box craft store and painted it brown, the skeleton key and small framed print I bought at yet another estate sale last weekend and the embroidered 'Do Not Want' was made for me (birthday gift) by one of my awesome friends, Christiana. More estate sale find, lace trim, rick-rack, needles and some little embroidered squares "To Mother." When I saw those it made me a little sad and I had to buy them. A baking handbook from my other awesome friend Lynsey, recipes for all sorts of fabulous classic desserts in there. Oh and they spell cookie 'cooky'. Love!Finally, my knit group (Memphis Knit Mafia, we're on Facebook!) installed our first piece of knit 'graffiti' last week at our favorite hangout, Cafe Eclectic. It was so fun, this is me taking my turn at securing the pole cozy to the old telephone pole we put it on. These women are the best and they've Tuesdays my favorite day of the week.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Tartest Lemon Tart

The name says is all, although I don't think my tart was as tart as some of my fellow TWD'ers. I used Meyer Lemons, boiled them first, then peeled them, it was much easier to remove the pith that way.

For the tart dough I used ground almonds in the flour and a sprinkling of ground pistachios. I am actually not a fan of the shortbread-style tart dough. I like shortbread cookies but for some reason I just don't love the tart base. It always seems overcooked and too crumbly. (see below of evidence) But that's probably my fault. Plus I need to invest in a proper tart pan.I did enjoy using the blender for the filling. Waaay easier than trying to jam everything into my tiny food processor. Once the dough was done the filling was simple to do. Since my oven tends to run a little hot I baked this at 350 degrees the entire 40 minutes. It still was a little to brown on the edges and it spilled over but I think a lot of other people had that problem too.

All in all it wasn't bad, it was a little more tart than say lemon bars, but the consistency was similar. Like Dorie said the filling had a jelly-like quality to it, not quite lemon curd but not really marmalade either. I usually like lemon desserts but I think this was just a little too lemony for my tastes. But I still enjoyed making it! Thank you to Babette of Babette Feasts for this week's selection!

Garden: Week (I lost count...)

My posting has been crappy lately because I've been busy with lots of things but everything should be quiet for awhile now. My garden is coming along, I still have a few more things to plant but we've had so much rain lately it's been hard to get out there. Doug built me three more raised beds but I still have to dig the area where they're going and lay the brick between them. Last Sunday it rained but I went out anyway and planted tomatoes I had bought at the Farmer's Market (from Whitton Farms), fennel, peppers, eggplant and a few other herbs my mom got me. When the rain got really heavy I took a break and caught up on my This American Life podcasts.

I'm not doing as many things from seed this year mainly because I got busy and a lot of my things just do better right in the ground instead of growing early seedlings. I rotated crops this year too, except for the herb bed, I kept them in the same spot. These are purple podded pole beans, a heirloom variety discovered in the Ozarks in the 1930's. I did plant these as seeds, ordered from Seed Savers.

This is Yugoslavian Red lettuce I planted as seed last year and it never came up. Then, out of the blue, it poked out of the bed sometime in late March.

Serrano chiles, bronze fennel and tomatoes in this bedThe herb bed, the golden sage, chocolate mint, parsley and lemon thyme all survived the entire winter out there. The rest of the plantings are new. The tiniest beginnings of Scarlet Nantes carrots, also from Seed SaversAnd three of the established beds, you can see the new beds in the back. My fingers are crossed that it will be dry this weekend so I can plant those few things.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Tiramisu Cake

Mmm, some of my favorite things, coffee, cake, Italian cream cheese, chocolate...

Such a delicious cake. I opted to divide the recipe and make it in my jumbo cupcake pan. Half of the batter made six over sized cupcakes. The only thing that I didn't have quite enough of was the filling/frosting. I probably shouldn't have divided that because honestly is there ever enough frosting? This was a great recipe, there were a lot of steps but the taste was well worth it. Thanks to Megan of My Baking Adventures for this week's selection!