Mix and Shout

A few days before my birthday I got this ridiculous idea in my head that my parents had gotten me a car. It would have been a timely gift, since I'd recently totalled mine. They'd been dropping hints about my present, saying it was too big to bring to the restaurant and that maybe I could come by the house to get it. My mind jumped from,

"I don't want anything big for my birthday. Just dinner with the family," to "Holy shit, what if they got me a car?"

Then I felt shame wash over me. What is this, my super sweet sixteen? I don't want my parents to buy me a car. I have a 401K, shouldn't I be buying my own cars now?

The big reveal came and turns out, it wasn't a car. It was better. It was a KitchenAid Stand Mixer. A few weeks later I unboxed it, releasing it from its styrofoam shackles to reveal a gleaming stainless steel beauty.

Even the instructions for the KitchenAid Stand Mixer are smug. Over and over again it implies that your new mixer will run laps around your other kitchen appliances. Such gems, unedited from the handbook, include:

"Your KitchenAid Stand Mixer will mix faster and more thoroughly than most other electric Stand Mixers."

And,

"The Stand Mixer may warm up during use. Under heavy loads with extended mixing time periods, you may not be able to comfortably touch the top of the unit. This is normal."

I couldn't decide which recipe to try on its maiden voyage. I didn't want something complicated and liable to fail. What if I cursed my new mixer? I consulted Jeff, who suggested bread, and I agreed that a life-sustaining staple like bread would be a great way to start. Then I disregarded that advice and made Smitten Kitchen's Strawberry Cake.

I'll spare the suspense and let you know that it came out really well. There was an episode of burning cheese in the oven, remnants of a frozen pizza, that sent me throwing windows open through the apartment and re-distributing fans.

And the mixer. To borrow a line from the marketing team behind Stella Artois, "She is a thing of beauty." Smooth, sophisticated, self-assured. It made cake-making quick and easy, which is helpful when you start a cake at 11 PM on a Monday night.

I could go on about it but it's time for me to catch up on Wimbledon matches on the DVR, and I have a slice of strawberry cake to attend to.

Tray Chic: Lunch at Jean Robert’s Table

The afternoon lunch rush just got a little more chic. Jean Robert’s Table recently began serving a tray lunch Monday through Friday – a $14 meal including a soup, salad, savory dish and dessert. No substitutions allowed and no reservations necessary.

The tray program is promoted as a quicker, more efficient way to have a full meal without overextending your lunch hour. With all four courses served at once you’re free to set your own pace once the tray has arrived. It’s the water slide rather than the lazy river.

Don’t be fooled though, as with any meal at Table, careful prep and excellent ingredients make up each dish. If it’s truly speed that you need, grab a sack of coneys from down the street. But if you have a full lunch hour to spare, a seat at the Table bar is waiting for you.

I stopped in on a work-from-home day this week. I may have been there a little bit late in the lunch time frame, and it was a rainy afternoon, but everyone around me seemed to be lingering rather than rushing back to the office. I probably spent a full hour in the restaurant from the time I took my seat at the bar to my exit back to the cold, drizzly sidewalk. I wasn’t in a hurry.

As promised, four courses arrived at once – a mushroom soup, salmon salad, duck confit and a small square of flourless chocolate cake with a pillow of white chocolate mousse propping up two slivers of strawberry on either side.

What do the French do to potatoes that makes them so much better than potatoes? I have my suspicions.

I started at the soup and worked my way counter-clockwise to dessert. Portions were just right, and my petite dessert was a perfect way to end my meal without sending me careening toward a 3:30 sugar-induced nap. I left completely satisfied and just $14 poorer – for a weekday lunch, it’s a great fine dining option without the fuss.

The Getaway

I spent Monday afternoon and night at the Inn at Cedar Falls nestled into the heart of Central Ohio's Hocking Hills. It's an adorable, rustic-yet-sophisticated inn and restaurant with a cluster of cottages and cabins. Alex and I spent a night off the grid in said adorable cottage with no internet, TV or cell reception. It was glorious.



A full post is on the way, in which I will describe how I overcame my fear of ticks and tasted some of the best mushrooms I have ever put into my mouth. For now, take a look at my photos from the Inn and the surrounding area. And then maybe turn off your computer, phone, TV, and find a place to kick back for a while. I promise it's not as scary as it sounds.

Shooting Your Food

Restaurants are pretty much the worst when it comes to photography. Anyone who has pulled out an iPhone at a mood-lit bistro to snap a photo of her dish knows this. Extreme low light and colored light sources can make the most mouth-watering entrée look disgusting in a photo. For examples, please look at any picture I ever took at Bootsy’s.

A big DSLR fares much better in low light, but say goodbye to anonymity when you pull it out in that brand new restaurant. And don’t forget that you’ll have to haul it around through sessions of pre-dinner cocktails and whatever you’re doing after dinner.

It’s a no-win situation.

In recent years though, compact camera makers have attempted to load point-and-shoots with specialized modes for low light situations. Higher end compacts offer bigger sensors with better light-gathering potential, but they also cost about the same as an entry-level DSLR.

Sony’s WX9 attempts to fight the good low-light fight at a reasonable price. I was recently invited to test it out with a group of food bloggers in San Diego over two days of diet-busting indulgence.

We photographed a lot of food that was styled specifically for our needs as eaters and photographers. Therefore, what you see here could be thought of as somewhat a-typical of normal dining circumstances. We had lunch under the open sky on the beach. This is not how I usually photograph food.

But putting that aside, it was really, really fun. The WX9 will make most of your photographic decisions if you want it to, and it generally does a good job at getting things right. You think less about your settings and more about how you want to compose your shot, and then more importantly, how you want to get the food on your plate into your mouth.

We were also turned loose on a farmer’s market in Oceanside. Note that in the image below hot oil had soaked through the napkin and was scorching my hand. I kept still anyway for the photo.

Like most other point-and-shoots, the Cyber-shot WX9 fared very well in the ample sunshine of the farmer’s market. A lot of food bloggers aren’t going to do much editing or tinkering with settings anyway, so it might be ideal for the person who wants to snap a photo and move on to the next one.

We were also provided with plenty of interior lighting during dinner – all twelve courses of it. Chef Chris Ivens-Brown, VP of Culinary Development at Compass Group prepared a beautiful meal for us to capture with our cameras and our forks. It was a delight.

Dinner was served at Sony’s San Diego headquarters in a lovely dining room on a top floor, providing us with the opportunity to use the camera’s Sweep Panorama mode. This is a feature that Sony pioneered and now offers on nearly every Cyber-shot camera. You’ll press the shutter and pan the camera across a horizontal or vertical scene while the WX9 captures a handful of rapid-fire images and then stitches them together to create one panoramic image. It’s intuitive and mindlessly easy to use.

As point-and-shoots go, the WX9 has a lot to offer at a tasty price. For my money, it doesn’t solve the low light problem, but it is a lot of fun to use. And here’s the better news – Sony has provided me with a Cyber-shot DSC-WX9 to give away to a lucky Chickpeas, Please reader! Leave a comment on this post and tell me about what you most like to photograph and you'll be eligible to win. I'll keep the contest open through a week from today - Wednesday May 18, at which point I'll randomly pick a winner. Good luck and good shooting!

Disclosure: Sony paid for my travel to and from San Diego, ground transportation, two nights at the Rancho Bernardo Inn and all of my meals over the course of the trip. The WX9 camera I used was mine to keep when I went home. A review of this camera was published on Digital Camera Review where I'm the site editor – we did not keep that product sample, and we never keep the cameras that we review.

Cirque du Soleil OVO Tapis Rouge: Enough to make you blush

For a time in high school, I was a huge fan of Cirque du Soleil. Admittedly, that's a weird thing to be a huge fan of, but we all have our weird stuff, right? ...right?

Anyway, during this time, I learned a lot of useless knowledge about Cirque du Soleil. For example, did you know that Cirque is pretty much the NFL of circuses? It's where all jugglers/contortionists/Ukranian children aspire to perform one day. They have 401Ks and dental insurance. It's the big leagues.

Also, there are touring shows, such as OVO. For those a caravan of semi-trucks descends on a vacant parking lot in a major city, assembles the Grand Chapiteau and basically sets up a little Cirque village for the run of the show. There are also permanent shows in theaters across the globe. Vegas has a Cirque show on every quarter mile of the strip.

You can imagine I was excited when my dear friend Darcy Little told us a few months ago that Cirque would be visiting Cincinnati. Not only that, but she was going to be handling PR for this tour stop. She's kind of a badass like that. She was very kind to get me into the OVO preview show last night with Tapis Rouge tickets.

So what is Tapis Rouge? For merely hundreds of dollars you get a premium seat, a sweet parking space, a cocktail hour before the show and desserts during intermission.

The food is a mix of comfortable cocktail party fare (think goat cheese crostini) and more exotic eats, like the edible orchids with chicken salad and - oh yes - sweet and sour chicken on a stick wrapped in cotton candy. This sounds awful. I could have eaten twenty of them.

At intermission Alex and I sprinted back to the Tapis Rouge tent, shouting at all of the friends we saw along the way "Can't talk! Must get cupcakes!" Sorry friends.

If you want to splurge, I highly recommend taking the Tapis Rouge route. Wine and beer is included in the ticket - we brought ours to our seats when it was time for the show. The food is fun and there's more than enough to make a meal. (Vegetarians be warned, your options are slightly limited.) You're guaranteed an awesome seat, though there really isn't a bad one in the place.

Whether or not you go all in on the Tapis Rouge experience, you really shouldn't miss OVO while it's here. It is the NFL of circuses, after all. After two hours of mind-blowing contortion, trapeze-ing, singing, juggling and jumping, you'll be glad you went.

Many thanks to Darcy and Vehr Communications for the tickets! It was a blast.

Yelp Drinks, Cincinnati Edition

Looking for something to celebrate? It's Cincinnati's first ever bar week, sponsored by Yelp.com! Today through Sunday 21 local bars will be featuring specialty cocktails, wine and beer for half price until 9pm. What does that mean exactly? When happy hour rolls around, stroll into a participating bar such as Neon's Unplugged and get a drink like their featured Elderflower Gimlet for $4. Find all of the bars and drink specials here.

You'll find cocktails and other drinks priced somewhere between 3 and 5 dollars. Here are some highlights:

• Drafts for $2.50 at Lackmann
• Kentucky Bourbon Ale for $2.50 at Molly Malone's
• Old Fashioned for $3.75 at Virgil's
  

In addition to the special prices available all week, Yelp is hosting an official Happy Hour each night at various participating locations around town. These events are open to anyone and include free appetizers. There's a complete list of those events here, starting with Dilly Deli tonight with its famous beer cheese, provided for free. All of these special Happy Hours run from 7 to 9pm.

Full disclosure, our local Yelp Cincinnati Community Manager happens to be my boyfriend. Not that this is a surprise to anyone reading this blog.

Waste Not, Want Not

Grandma Johnson, like a lot of other grandparents, lived through the depression. I guess because of this she developed, as anyone might, a reluctance to throw away food. She was sitting at our kitchen table on one of her visits enjoying some baby carrots (our family has a long history with baby carrots) and she dropped one on the floor. She didn’t hesitate, just picked the carrot up – it had rolled onto the living room carpet – and said:

“Waste not, want not,” popping it into her mouth.

Mom pleaded with her to throw it out as she was doing this, arguing that she could actually see cat hairs stuck to the dewy carrot skin, but Grandma Johnson lived by her words. She was an English teacher, after all.

We as a family remember this with mild horror and affection. We still bring it up occasionally when we think of her. “Waste not, want not.”

I’ve talked before about my own struggle to be a frugal yet creative cook. You know that Oatmeal comic about cooking at home? It pretty much sums up my first frustrating experiences going solo in the kitchen. In fact, my dear friend and former roommate Jon just reminded me of the first time I tried to cook chicken and the destruction I caused in our tiny Oxford, Ohio kitchen. We remember it fondly of course, and the photographic evidence lives on in Facebook glory.

I’m trying to evolve into a resourceful home cook with a well-stocked pantry. I want to develop a repertoire of tasty and cost-effective recipes I can fall back on when inspiration fails to strike. I’m not quite there.

I thought of Grandma Johnson and her famous words when I found this mustardy carrot slaw recipe on CHOW. I loaded up a Madison’s shopping basket with about two pounds of carrots (the adult ones) and brought them home to meet my box grater. I figured if I made a few side dishes and tasty spreads at the start of the week, I could work my way through them at lunchtime from Monday to Friday.

Grating two pounds of carrots turned out to be more work than I imagined. I got through it, mixed up the dressing and worked it all together with my bare hands. I didn’t have chives on hand and had to substitute white wine vinegar for red, but the taste is still zingy, sweet and mustardy.

I juiced the orange that I had used for its zest and fished a tiny bottle of bubbly from the back of the refrigerator. Waste not, want not? I can live by that.