Spring and Baking

It's spring!

I've baked a lot in the past week, but I've been slacking on photographing my creations. Nevertheless, you should try out these recipes:

KALE CHIPS:
Yes, that's right, kale chips. Just kale leaves tossed with salt and olive oil and baked in the oven. So good you won't be able to stop eating them, even if you're not normally inclined to eat kale by the fistfuls. Trust me on this one.

QUINOA MUFFINS:
I doctored up this recipe to experiment with healthy substitutes in baking. I used skim milk instead of whole, applesauce instead of vegetable oil (same amount), whole wheat flour instead of all-purpose, half a mashed banana instead of an egg, and cut the brown sugar to 1/2 cup. They turned out really well! They're dense and chewy, and great as breakfast with a cup of coffee.

ESPRESSO CHOCOLATE SHORTBREAD COOKIES:
I baked these with a friend for the espresso break during our weekly Italian seminar. They turned out really well for what they are, but I'm not that crazy about shortbread, so I'm not sure I'd make them again. Don't get me wrong, they were delicious - espresso, chocolate, butter, how could you go wrong? - but I think I prefer a more doughy, chewy cookie.



And a few recipes I want to try soon...

Strawberry Bread

Raspberry-Topped Lemon Muffins

Crispy Salted Oatmeal White Chocolate Cookies

Let me know if you make any of these, or anything else, and then give me the recipe!

More of The Little Prince

Yes, I know, it's been a while. I should write a long entry about my spring break service trip to New Orleans, but for now, I'll just write a quick update on my Little Prince collection!

You might remember my collection of The Little Prince books in different languages. (See this post for photos.) I recently got two new copies, bumping my collection up to 21 languages! When my parents went to Lancaster, PA in February they bought me a copy in Pennsylvania Dutch (yes, that's right) and my friend Carly, who was traveling around Brazil for the past two months, bought me a copy in Brazilian Portugese. (A different edition, with a slightly different title, is published in Portugal.)

Pennsylvania Dutch

Brazilian Portugese

I'm hoping to be able to buy myself a copy in a new language this year - we'll see where my travels take me! And if you happen to travel to a country that speaks a language I don't have a copy of, keep your eyes open for bookstores and a book with a little boy standing on a gray planet.

Yummy foods

Just to make you drool...

On Valentine's Day my housemates and I made pork chops and risotto with broccoli (click for recipe), with white wine.



And for Mardi Gras, I made this King's Cake for my Italian class to have during our espresso break halfway through our seminar. It's actually just cinnamon buns formed into an oval, with colored frosting and a coin baked in. The coin comes from the Three Kings / Mardi Gras tradition of baking a baby into the cake. The person who finds the baby is the king or queen for the day, and also must provide the next King's Cake. My Italian class is all about Boccaccio's Decameron, in which a group of seven young ladies and three young men escape the plague of Florence in 1348, and go to the country and tell stories for ten days. Each day there is a different king or queen who picks the theme of the day's stories, and then picks the next king or queen. Our professor had provided cookies to go with the espresso until this past week, but he decided that since there are 10 of us in the class and 10 weeks left, from now on we'll take turns bringing something to go with the espresso. Therefore, the person who found the coin in my King's Cake has to bring something next week, and will be the queen of the day. So I thought that the King's Cake fit in very well not only with the celebration of Mardi Gras, but also with the theme of our class!

Lisa Kudrow is speaking at graduation

Vassar just announced that Lisa Kudrow (class of '85) is speaking at our graduation in May. I've seen her speak on campus before and really enjoyed it. We're very excited because last year's speaker was...really boring. Although now this will make seats at graduation even harder to snag, if you're one of my blog readers who's planning to come (it's first come, first seated). Luckily, I'll have a reserved seat. ;)

The past two weeks

Happy February! Hopefully it's happy and not just plain freezing, which is all it's proven to be so far. I changed the header photo once again - it's the beach in La Rochelle, France in August of 2008, to remind me of summer and warmer days to come.

The past two weeks have been unbelievably busy. I started my last semester at college, which alone brings its own set of stresses, and I've maybe over-committed myself just a bit as well. I'm taking three seminars, which all have to do with the Italian Renaissance, which is very confusing when I have to keep dates and themes straight. I'm taking a class on Dante's Inferno (okay, late medieval, not Renaissance), Boccaccio's Decameron (we get espresso and cookies half-way through the 3-hours seminar; much needed caffeine at that point), and an art history seminar about Raphael. I'm also auditing a class on Dutch and Flemish art. In addition to that, I'm taking a jazz dance class, singing in choir (which rehearses 3 days a week for 1.5 hrs each day), teaching tap, and conducting an Italian language drill session. Yep, I've been keeping busy.

I've also decided to do a service trip over spring break, which I'll get credit for as well. It's through the Vassar Jewish Union, and it involves building houses in rural Louisiana on the Gulf Coast, an area that was hit hard by Katrina but received less aid than the city of New Orleans. The trip will also include discussions about community service and social justice in Judaism. I didn't decide to go on the trip because of the Jewish aspect, and I think there will be other non-Jews (don't know about half-Jews like me!) on the trip but I think there will be very interesting discussions. We'll spend the last night in New Orleans for Shabbat and explore the city then. I've never been to the South (although I know New Orleans has a culture all its own) so I'm looking forward to seeing a different part of the country, and doing something way out of my comfort zone.

As usual, my housemates and I have been cooking wonderful meals. On Saturday I made an onion and pepper quiche all by myself, and then we baked dark chocolate brownies with peanut butter swirled in. And watched Breakfast at Tiffany's!

Onion and pepper quiche

Dark chocolate peanut butter brownies

Audrey Hepburn singing "Moon River" in Breakfast at Tiffany's:

Immigrant Soles walking tour

Today I went on the Lower East Side Tenement Museum's walking tour called Immigrant Soles. The guide took us to many sites on the LES that were a part of the immigrant experience in the 19th and 20th centuries. Here are some of the highlights:

E.S. Ridley & Son, a department store built in 1874 where immigrants often came to buy American clothes

The Eldridge Street Synagogue, the first eastern European Jewish synagogue in America

Allen Street and the Manhattan Bridge

Looking uptown on Allen Street

Jarmulowsky Bank, a bank opened in 1912 by a Russian-Jewish immigrant, where immigrants kept their money. They could also buy ship tickets to bring relatives to America.

Loew's Canal movie theater, opened in 1927. That brown metal grid on top of the façade is one of the first air conditioners ever! Now it's about to be converted into a Chinatown Cultural Center, which you can read about here. (That link also shows two photos of what the Loew's theater looked like back in its heyday.)

The Jewish Daily Forward Building, which housed the bilingual English-Yiddish newspaper which helped immigrants adjust to life in America. The building, which has landmark status, is preserved, but now is filled with luxury apartments. Note the writing "Forward" on the side of the building.

P.S. 42, a public school that has been educating immigrant children and children of immigrants for over 100 years. In 1898, when it opened, students were mostly Italian and Jewish, and today the student body is primarily Chinese and Latino.

We also stood in this spot on Orchard Street, looking south from Hester Street, where this photograph was taken in 1898. At the time, it was the most populated area on earth. On earth.

Then (1898)...

...And now.
Not one person in the photo!

I also recently bought the book Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, which contains 14 walking tours in different neighborhoods of Manhattan. I hope to tackle many of them when the weather gets warmer!

New York Eats

This winter break I've been going to some of my favorite places to eat in New York, and trying some new ones as well.

Lael and I hit up Alice's Tea Cup a few times, which I wrote about in this entry last February.

I had both brunch and dinner at Veselka, a Ukrainian diner in the East Village that's a New York institution. They were recently written up in the NYTimes in this article about their Christmas Eve banquet (which is Jan 6th on the Ukrainian Orthodox calendar). The article even includes some Ukrainian recipes. I haven't tried any of them but they look delicious!

Tonight I met my friend Carly for a hot chocolate date at Max Brenner, which I had passed many times, but it was always too crowded to go inside. We both got Mexican spicy hot chocolate - I got dark chocolate - and it was delicious. It was served in a "hug mug," which is designed so that you cup it with both hands and sip from the pointy end, "hugging" the mug. The foam on top was swirled into a heart shape!


And of course, I got some good diner food in as well. What's New York cuisine without diners?