Day 120: Raisins

What is there to say about raisins really?  They're good. I wouldn't fight, lie, walk the wire, or die for them, but they are nice. Maybe we can just be friends.

Liz picked me up some mixed type raisins at New Seasons. They all taste the same to me, but as grapes go, I prefer the green ones. They have a cleaner after taste.

I also spent a little time trying to do a dog trick. Only took me like 20 tries.

Day 119: Shrimp Scampi

Another day done during my lunch time. I did the same thing as ravioli and went to Mama Mia. I ended up showing up early and they were still ready for me. I went back to work and ate out on the patio which has been open for a few weeks now.

It was a bit windy. Windy enough to blow away the bag I was using as a plate for the bread slices they gave me. Poor bag.

As for the food, other than the shrimp scampi part, it was great. I bit halfway into a shrimp and I got shivers of disgust followed inklings of retching from my gut. I spit it out quickly and just removed the shrimp. Just thinking about it now is making me unwell. That texture is just so wrong.

Day 118: Blueberry Pie

Liz picked up the pie at QFC. I almost wish all the days were just this easy days.

This might be the best blueberry pie I've had. Very fruity and sweet.

Day 117: Prime Rib

The day was a struggle. I tried to pick up some meat at both New Seasons and Fred Meyer, but they don't really carry it unless it's around Christmas. Why are all these foods for Christmas? Maybe I want egg nog in July!

 

 

One of the few options I had was to go to an Elmer's. So I went to the Tigard location at 4 pm, when they start serving dinner, and got my 9 oz rancher's prime rib with fries and salad. I am now a senior citizen showing up for the early bird. Where did I put my Depends?

 

 

The thing about prime rib is that is one of the fattier cuts of meat. As I pointed out in the glazed ham post, I'm not big on the fat. I did my best to cut around the fat, but I was a fan. It was pretty salty. I also shouldn't have started by dipping it in the horseradish sauce. The service and fries were good, I guess.

Day 116: Pretzels

I went with both regular pretzels ans soft pretzels (with dipping cheese).

I love soft pretzels. If I ever go to the airport, I must get a soft pretzel. So lovely.

Day 115: Zucchini Bread

I've never had zucchini bread. I'm not a huge fan of zucchini and that's probably why. It's not something I hate; it's more of a why bother. I got the recipe from allrecipes.com. I ignored the walnuts and halved the recipe.

It came out great and smells pretty good. It's about as good as zucchini. Not bad, but why bother. I could have spent that time making banana bread.

Day 114: Pigs-in-a-Blanket

Who doesn't love some good metaphor food? I though about doing full on hot dogs or maybe even baloney in a tortilla. I decided to make it cute and go with mini wieners in crescents.

I was a little disappointed to find that we were out of ketchup, but luckily the wieners were spicy so they were able to provide their own flavor. It actually hard to save any for Liz.

Makes me want to curl up in bed and nap.

Day 113: Cherry Cheesecake

Well, another day with fruit that's not in season. Maybe the overlords that decide these days are in another part of the world. Or maybe all the good days were taken before the cherry cheesecake people got their s#!t together. Anyway. We got high fructose corn syrup laden cherry pie filling to top our cheesecake. Oh, what am I saying? I don't eat that stuff. So Alex's cheesecake.

He was happy. <See illustration>

Day 112: Jelly Beans

One of Liz's friends gave her a bunch of Jolly Rancher jelly beans before Easter. I held onto them until today. At work we have three days of meetings and I put them in a bowl at our table.

It's nice to have something to nibble on while people show you powerpoints.

Or if you are headed to your desk to blog.

Day 111: Chocolate-Covered Cashew Truffle

The trouble with truffles is that they take a hell of a long time to make. We amassed all the ingredients, which included strange things like pasteurized egg whites and instant powdered milk, and got to work early on in the evening. It turns out that you're supposed to make the filling and then refrigerate it for 8 hours (at least). We did not see this detail. Oh dear. So we popped the filling in the freezer and melted the chocolate for the covering. Turns out we jumped the gun, because the filling never actually hardened up. So, we eventually got super impatient and plopped the chocolate on top of the semi-hardened filling. This is what we got.

We were also supposed to melt white chocolate to drizzle over the completed truffles but eff that. We've done enough.

It ended up as more of a chocolate cracker with creepy, eggy, cashew pate. That'll teach us to fudge a recipe, I guess.

Day 110: Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Alex made the cake this morning, and he did a bang-up job!

It turned out to be a super good cake, and we brought it over to Easter dinner at my parents' house. Notice the fun photo bomb!

Happy Zombie Jesus/420 Day, everyone!

Day 109: Amaretto

Gross. Sweet. Yecchhhh.

We went to The Clubhouse for this drink and they comped it. Thanks, Dee and Becks!

Day 108: Animal Crackers

Today is actually animal cracker's birthday. I did my best to find the cute little boxes with the string, but all I could find was the big bag or little mini bags.

The Barnum's Animals are probably the best you can get. A little sweet and they don't dry your mouth out like a Trisket.

I'm a little curious why all the animals on the bag have babies, yet there are no baby cookies.

Day 107: Cheeseball

I was looking forward to this day. I always start to salivate when I see the giant tubs of cheeseballs. Of course, Liz came home the other day telling me they didn't have cheeseballs and they sounded disgusting. She was talking about the standard cheeseball you see at parties covered in nuts. I was thinking of the puffy kind. I thought I'd keep it easy and just do my kind. When I got to the store, I decided I should cover my bases and do both.

I'm all cool with spreadable cheese, but this almond junk is ridiculous. It makes it less spreadable. If I wanted nuts in it, I'd get a nuttier cracker. After the first few spreads, I just sliced the top off and dug into the cheesy center for the good stuff.

It was a very weird experience to alternate between the two. I still like mine better.

Day 106: Eggs Benedict

Ah, what a comedy of errors. For our Eggs Benedict (hereby referred to as EB from now on), we went to Holman's, whose website said they served breakfast all day and had EB on the menu. When we talked to the waitress, she said they did not serve EB all day. So we drank our water and headed to New Seasons Market (dot com!) and collected our ingredients. I found a great recipe that explained in detail how to easily poach eggs and prepare Hollandaise sauce in the blender. I instructed Alex through the process.

Well, the smoke detector went off (which always happens when we use the broiler) as Alex was poaching the egg and melting the butter for the sauce. This resulted in the egg being a wee bit too overdone and the sauce was quite runny, BUT. It was delightful! Creamy, lemony sauce with a kick of cayenne and eggs done, truthfully, exactly how I like them. Alex had one bite and gave the rest to me. Hooray!

The very best thing is that now Alex knows how to make EB and we still have tons of supplies for more. I'm thinking Sunday morning I'll have him give it another go.

Day 105: Glazed-Spiral Ham

I've never been a ham fan, so I wasn't looking forward to this. Liz picked up some ham slices from HoneyBaked Ham. It was cut thick and I was ready to be disgusted.

I wasn't. It was actually pretty tasty. That sweet flavor was quite nice. This hasn't really turned me around on ham though. It's mainly the times when I bite into a ham sandwich and half the sandwich comes out because I didn't chew the fat enough.

Although, it may turn me around on the glazed hams.

Day 104: Pecan

I am not a fan of pecans (or walnuts) so this was all Alex. He snacked on them while I did a little background research on the pecan. Like many 'nuts,' the pecan is not a nut- it's a drupe. A drupe is a fruit with a stone or pit, surrounded by a husk. It's very similar to a walnut, although a walnut contains about twice as much Omega-6 as a pecan.

I had planned to get pecans in bulk, but New Seasons Market (dot com!) was out, so I purchased Woodstock Organic Pecan Halves. Alex ate them up quickly.

One more cool thing about pecans- the trees can live to be more than 300 years old! I wonder if our pecans came from a tree that age-d. That would be cool.

Day 103: Peach Cobbler

Well, it's not peach season until next week, and even then it's pretty early. So we had some bags of frozen peaches on hand and we defrosted them throughout the day while we relaxed at Hagg Lake. The recipe we found was weird. It said to melt a stick of butter in the bottom of a 9 x 13 pan, then mix flour, sugar (a whole cup), milk, an egg and baking powder and then pour it evenly over the melted butter. Ummm, a thick, gelatinous mixture spread evenly? Ok. Then we were supposed to mix the peaches, ANOTHER cup of sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon (of which we had to self-grind) and pour it, without mixing, over all of that. The results were, well, not amazing.

Unfortunately, despite the lone egg in the recipe, the cobbler was super eggy. Like, gross eggy. I was unable to finish my portion. Alex finished his, but he did not like it. Too bad.

Oh man. I was hoping for so much more. I guess we need to screen our recipes better the next time.

Day 102: Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Who doesn't love a good grilled cheese? They are easy to make and have that oowie-goowie center with the crisp outer coating. Heaven.

Of course, if you make grilled cheese sandwiches you can't not make tomato soup. I think that's a law or something.

Mmmmm! Happy times.

Day 101: Cheese Fondue

When I first think of this dish, I'm reminded of one of the family trips we took and my dad changed the words of "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You" by Heart to "All I Wanna Do Is Make Cheese Fondue". And to imagine it took me this long to ever have cheese fondue. We went to the same place we went for chocolate fondue, The Pied Cow Coffehouse.

The fondue comes with bread, broccoli, carrot, and apple. That is also my order of preference. Liz helped me out very little with this one. She got a bean and rice plate for herself. Even without her help I was able to clean up quite nice. We also had room to split a banana split. One thing that did catch our eyes was the "50 Dollar Sundae". I'll have to get a group together for that.

Do I have something in my teeth?

The most entertaining part of the night was our waitress. She had an slight accent we couldn't pin and was all dolled up like she walked out of the 1930's. We started to imagine this night being reenacted on Unsolved Mysteries. We'd come back to find only an old burned down building and a nearby elderly man would tell us, "That place burned down eighty years ago. There was pretty little waitress that got caught inside too. Poor thing. She was supposed to be married the next day."

Day 100: Cinnamon Crescents

This is a good day turned bad. I woke up and my back tire had a flat, so I had to pump Liz's bike's tires and ride her bike to work. I'm pretty sure Liz decided to make some of the crescents for me so that when I got home I'd have a treat to help me sooth my irksome start. I'm pretty sure she used this recipe. She said she'd make half and leave the others in the fridge for me to make.

When I got home, I had to fix her bike because there were some broken parts; hell, while I was at it, I decided to fix the shelves in the bathroom too. At least I got some lovely treats while I worked. I didn't get a picture of the ones she made because I ate them so fast. After eating them I started on the fresh batch. Unfortunately, I left the bag of glaze in the wrong place so I had glaze and melted plastic dripping down everywhere. Not only that, but I had the smoke detector screaming at me off and on the whole time. I hate that thing. So no glaze for this batch.

oh, you tasty troublemakers

 After I pulled them out, I finally got a taste of the fresh batch. They are really good even without the glaze. Though the glaze would really have been the... icing on the cake?!

Day 99: Chinese Almond Cookie

I went back to Xuyen Bakery to make this easy. It's the same place I got the cream puffs. They are very nice there. Once this project is done I hope to go and get something by just browsing.

They had the cookies individually wrapped which made for a very quick and easy purchase.

It's one hell of a thick cookie. It kind of tastes like a peanut butter cookie, but with a much, much lighter flavor. The website says it goes great with milk and I'm sure it does.

Day 98: Empanada

I had planned to get a dessert empanada, but my search for empanadas in Portland changed my mind. I found a street cart called PDX Empanadas and took a quick bike there.

 

 

I ordered the cheese with green beans which seemed to throw the seller off. She told me it would be about 10 minutes and asked how I found he place. I gave her the project idea and she had a smile of recognition. She told me that someone did something like that last year. She also let me know that at the location I was at, she sells more meaty empanadas, but at the farmer's market they go crazy for the non-meat options.

 

 

I ate the handheld pie outside since it was a spectacular day. And the empanada did not fail to compete with the type of day. Tasty!

Day 97: Coffee Cake

Despite the word coffee in the name, Alex loves Coffee Cake. So do I. There is something about a super moist cake with streusel topping that just satisfies the sweetness craving.

We went with Schwartz Brothers Classic Coffee Cake, which brings me back, again, to my Starbucks days (see Pound Cake). Starbucks no longer uses Schwartz Brothers for their pastries, instead switching to La Boulange. I think this was a dumb move because Schwartz Brothers makes an infinitely better Coffee Cake. (Sorry, La Boulange. You still win with your baked eggs).

Coffee Cake does not need coffee to be enjoyed. Now I must go claim my piece before Alex eats it all.

Day 96: Caramel Corn

Growing up in Portland, no trip to Lloyd Center was complete without a visit to Joe Brown's Carmel Corn shop. Despite the fact that they spell caramel carmel, the product is without a doubt fantastic. Only trouble was (for me) that I preferred a savory popcorn to a caramel corn. Often my father would sneak off and return with a huge box of carmel corn, and the family would gleefully scarf it down while my cutoff was about two pieces. Oh, well. So, for nostalgia's sake, I took Alex to Joe Brown's for our caramel corn treat.

EXACTLY the same

After telling Alex the above story, he sweetly offered to let me have anything I wanted there. I quickly refused, and then just as quickly changed my mind. Why yes, I would have a buttered popcorn, all to myself. Ain't he great?

We also got him a new snappy shirt. Alex loved the carmel corn, and I, for once, did not need any. I had my own, sans caramel.

Day 95: Caramel

Liz picked up some Quin: Jacobsen sea salt caramels.

They are deeeelicious! I had about half of them for breakfast. Of course breakfast was really lunch since I woke up at 1:15 pm. I would have had more, but I didn't want to waste good gaming time on International TableTop Day.

They will not last the day.

Day 94: Cordon Bleu

I've never had anything Cordon bleu, meaning I only had a vague idea of what I was getting. From Liz's description, it didn't sound so bad, though I've never been a fan of ham.

I went to Chez Machin on Hawthorne. Actually, I went there twice. I went for lunch, but didn't notice on the website that the chicken Cordon bleu is a dinner menu item. I left before drinking the water and came back at 6 pm.

It has a pretty mellow flavor and tasted pretty good. It's not my cup of tea though. It was missing a little bit of a kick. Maybe some capers would have given it that certain je ne sais quoi.