And the Obligatory Food Photos

I made cream cheese sugar cookies last weekend.


On Friday, I churned up a batch of cheesecake ice cream to bring to a friend's party. No, no chunks o' cake in this baby - ice cream that tastes like cheesecake filling through and through. But that's just white and not very photogenic, so no photos for you.

Turning away from pastry, I made quinoa for the first time this weekend. This has it mixed into carmelized onion, garlic, three kinds of mushroom and wilted spinach with a squirt of lemon juice:


And an old standby - cauliflower, celery, onions and asparagus on a baking sheet, heading into the oven to roast before being made into soup.

There are a lot of Rules in Roller Skating

Decision of a Century

For the past couple of weeks, I've been toying with the idea of doing a Century Ride - 100 miles (161 km - I'm still so very metric) of road cycling in one shot. I figure that since I've been pushing out 25 mile rides at a moderately easy pace post-weight training session that 100 miles is a do-able goal.

So, I've been toying with the idea - until I ordered The Complete Book of Long-Distance Cycling from Amazon. Even though 25 miles is easy to do, 100 miles, I know, is a different animal, and it's something that I'm going to need to train for, and learn how to fuel myself for.

September seems like a good goal to work towards. You all better hold me to it.

Totally unrelated, here's an obligatory what I made over the weekend food photo.




Regard, the mostly organic Chewy Oatmeal Raisin cookie. I modified the recipe to use whole wheat flour, add cinnamon and up the raisin factor.

Amano, Hermano

Via BlakeMakes.com and their Soopz network, this week I received three Amano Single Origin dark chocolate bars in the mail.

I heart dark chocolate, but I'm very demanding and more then a little snobbish about it. I am happy to report that Amano's bars made my heart flutter and my tastebuds dance with delight. All three are lovely, shiny looking bars with a strong snap. And talking about snap, each bar can be broken (or, using my preferred method of cutting with a serrated knife) into 15 squares, making sampling all three in one sitting an easy task.

The Ocumare (70% cacao - Venezuela) is the most typical of the bars. But when I say typical, I perhaps mean traditional tasting, as it stays truest to what you would expect in a dark chocolate. But, at the same time, it brings that flavour profile to a completely different level. Deep, and dark and peppery. This is a small bite bar, for sure - which just means that the savouring and tasting can go on for days.

The Cuyagua (70% cacao - Venezuela) is the newest, and limited edition, product in the Amano line-up. Though still possessing a lovely dark chocolate canvas, it layers on sweeter berry and tree-fruit flavours to an excellent effect.

The Madagascar (70% cacao - Madagascar) is my favourite, through and through. Biting into a square was revelatory, as the dark, deep chocolate was imbued with an excellent tart, tangy and citrus-y note. It also had a lovely, lighter feeling on the tongue then the more buttery feeling Ocumare.

Heart dark chocolate. Heart Amano. The end.

Al Gore and Granola - How Fortuitous

I've recently returned from seeing Al Gore speak with my friend Julie. I love me some Al Gore. Here are 2 20 second .wav files for your listening pleasure. Unfortunately, you're going to have to download them, as Blogger doesn't support embedding audio.

http://www.mediafire.com/?ofmyd005nmy

http://www.mediafire.com/?mbg0wt9m2nk

Also, visit WeCanSolveIt.org. Al wants you to, sand so do I.

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Unrelated, I made granola from Heidi Swanson's book Super Natural Cooking. It rules.

If you'd like to try it on your own, Serious Eats has permission to post the recipe, and you can take a gander at it yourself. I used cranberries and mango as the fruit components.

Here's what it looks like before being thrown in the oven:



And when it came out: