Blind tasting and Wii cooking

Cruising around the food blogs today, one link leads to another, and I found a couple of odd little morsels to share with you.

Like this Wii cooking game, for instance... I guess it's one way to practice your knife skills ... plus there's that promise of "hot kitchen action" which I'm sure Smooth Melon would not be opposed to, har har. (Has anyone read all the reports of Wii-related injuries? And deaths, even? Huh.)



And then there was this article, which is a year old, but I just spotted it ... gives new meaning to the phrase "blind tasting."

Lovely, lovely things

Chocolate tastings and exotic salts are tres trendy these days. But I'm not one of those people to stop enjoying something I love simply because "everyone's" talking about it. Salt is so essential, and chocolate is so devine, and that's that.

This afternoon, a coworker splayed out an assortment of interesting bars that she'd picked up at Cost Plus, and one of them just blew me away. Vosges Chocolate makes the Barcelona Bar - "deep" milk chocolate (a milk chocolate-dark chocolate blend; no foodie snooty nose sniffing, milk chocolate is gooood!), delicate, hickory smoked almond bits, and grey sea salt. Ohhh la la, I fear I may become Augustus Gloop. One flavor gives way to the next ... you can practically see fireworks in my eyeballs as the various pleasure centers in my brain light up.

Yes, of course I know about all the hot little chocolate shops springing up across town. Meh. I can get chocolate and new napkin rings and Valentine tchotchkes at Cost Plus.

"Twas the Season of Eating

M'kay.

So I've been so super busy (yah, I know, the excuse the of non-blogging bloggers everywhere, but sheesh. I mean, The Devouring Woman is cheating on her blog. I check every week. Such a tease.). I've been occupied with stuff like, oh, giving birth. And falling completely in love with this little morsel of sweet goodness called My Daughter.

But, that squishy-lovey subject is for my mama blog. Right here? The place for food.

And since my hands are, these days, generally either full of work or full of baby, and therefore without a lot of time to caress the keyboard, I'm gonna let the pictures do the talking. (I'm not sure anyone is still reading this anyway - but heck.)

So, the holidays brought cranberry-pomegranate cocktails (thanks, bro!) ...





Lasagna that couldn't-a been more homemade without making our own gat-dang cheese ...





And this lovely, simple Christmas brekkie of cranberry-orange scones, mini quiches, Bloody Marys (thanks, K!), and Clementines that were pretty much the only thing my darling 12-year-old cousin would eat ...





Plus, we made the family specialty - Pizzelles. I'm sorry, but these are ever so much prettier than sugar cookies. They are such a tradition in our family, they get their very own post.

New Year's Resolution #3: blog at Miss Tasty's Cafe more often!

Pizzelles

I could swear I've posted about these before ... I know that I brought them to the Childhood Favorites dinner with my dinner club. But since I can't find a hint of them in my archives, away we go ...

Every Easter, every baby shower, every bridal shower, every wake, these wafer-y, golden cookies grace the table. They look like doilies. They look like snowflakes. They smell of lemon with a puff of licorice, or licorice with a twist of lemon, depending on which great-aunt you listen to in the Ongoing Battle of the Correct Pizzelle Recipe.

They don't always make an appearance during Christmas, probably because the Family Ladies are too busy hand-rolling pasta dough (which I have written about and pictured before), pulling preserves out of the root cellar, knitting scarves for all the cousins, or, these days, biting their nails as they sit in their office counting the minutes to a mad-dash lunch hour in which they can brave the mall for last minute gifities. (Oh, how times have changed.)

This year, prompted by my Fabulous Sister-in-Law K, who honored us with her desire to learn the craft and share stacks of Pizzelle goodness with her own relatives, we dusted off the irons and ... mmmm. It was so, so good to have that smell, rising in the little wisps of steam escaping the edges of the iron, drifting through my house.

The recipe is old, and not really written down (until I transcribed a phone call to my grandmother onto a recipe card). It calls for a lot of eggs, butter, sugar, and flavourings, with flour added until it "sort of slumps off the spoon."



The first few are always burnt and off center. And then, you hit the zone. Your batter is placed perfectly, your nose prickles at just the right moment, and the lid is lifted to reveal beautiful, scalloped, sunny circles of lace.



The stacks fill the table, and shrink as little fingers steal them away, nibbling.