Happy Birthday Guest Blog!

Today is the 1 year anniversary of my sister's lovely blog. If you aren't familiar with Le Culinary Creusette then you kind of need to check it out asap. Not only is she my little sis, she's a fabulous home chef living with her equally fabulous sous chef. Together they cook, hit up totally enviable restaurants (Volt!), and have really cool parties... and Mr. sous chefs' homemade chex mix is to. die. for. AND she totally won a huge Le Creuset for this awesome recipe of mine that she did her own little tweaks on (must run in the family I guess).

So Happy Birthday Le Culinary Creusette! Here's to many more years as an amazing blog and my blogging inspiration!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BLOG!

Yup. Le Culinary Creusette is a year old today. What started as a fun idea over a grill with my friends has turned into a much larger project that has had over 980 unique visitors and 116 posts in one year.

Thanks so much to all my friends and family who have continued to follow my ramblings over the course of a year, as well as all of you who have found me through an accidental misspelling on the web.

In honor of the past year, I've culled together a few of my most popular posts of the year:

The Long and the Short of Dinners: I made Honey Mustard Chicken (short prep) and my Short Rib recipe (3+ hours) in the same week. Both were amazing.

Honey Mustard Chicken

Something New

Memorial Weekend is over and summer is officially here. The weekend has somehow flown by, but in the best way possible. I went to Masa one night and had a couch date with pizza and beer the next (though with the same person both nights of course). I laid out in my beautiful park a few days and finally hit up Governor's Island for the very first time- and it's so easy to get to!- so I'm ending the weekend a tad sunburnt, which is kind of a prerequisite for Memorial weekend anyways. I just finished an excellent book I could barely put down for the past week- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks- so if you're looking for a good, compelling and educational read this summer then definitely give it a shot. I also just started The Help, which is a great before or after read with TILOHL and I can barely put it down. And I finally got a beautiful new apron to cook in.

Lemon Curd Cream Cheese Frosting

I'm normally not a frosting gal, but I just adore cream cheese frosting. It just doesn't have that overly sugary, too much-ness that some frosting's can have but it's still smooth and creamy. I think it pairs especially well with fruit and with the Strawberry Buttermilk Cake, there's was something very La Madeline strawberries romanoff about the combination. Plus, unlike buttercream, it takes maybe 10 minutes to make. A snap. And with the right tips you can definitely frost it a little nicer than I did here.

Oh and this is a recipe I just made up. That's right. Didn't reference one single other recipe (besides my basic cream cheese recipe). So this just goes to show, if you think something will work, give it a shot! And with icing if you aren't sure, put half in a separate bowl, one to experiment on and the other as the just in case it doesn't work control. You never know what deliciousness you'll come up with, and if it doesn't work, you still have half a batch left.

Strawberry Buttermilk Cake

If you haven't noticed, I love taking something and making it "mini." Mini rhubarb pies, bread puddings, mini chicken pot pies, etc. It's not really because it's cute, it's more because I live alone and 75% of the meals I cook at home are just for me. I don't want a whole pie or cake sitting around for me to just pick at. My body, the way I want it to be, can't afford that so when I "mini" a recipe it's usually to have something that I can easily set aside, freeze back or easily cart around to my taste testers.

I also love buttermilk. Buttermilk pie is my absolute favorite pie, but also lemon buttermilk sorbet, buttermilk pancakes, soaking chicken in buttermilk before roasting... it's so wonderful and delicious and I'll reach for buttermilk much more often when I'm at the market over regular old (yucky) milk because I love doing so much more with it. And it goes so naturally with lemon that it's great for when the weather gets warm.

Comfort is... Chicken Pot Pie

2 years can easily be a very long or very short amount of time. It can go by in a instant or it can creep slowly along. A lot of heartbreak, a lot of soul searching and a lot of happiness can happen in 730 days. The way a person can grow and change and become who they've always wanted to be can be accomplished. Realizing dreams, letting go of the things that hold you back or hold you down, being your absolute best self can all come. I know. I'm the proof.

So Friday was my 2 year anniversary of being laid off. It was a very personal, sometimes painful journey but one I was bound and determined to not let get me down. I tried as best I could to continue with my life as much as it had been before but also really looked deep at the choices I was making and who I wanted to be and how I could alter my life to become that person. And I'm so happy to say, I'm getting there. I have a wonderful job that doesn't ask me to compromise myself and is a place I actually enjoy going to 5 days out of the week. I have a lovely home that I work hard to maintain. The fact that it is everything I could want at this moment in my life makes me so proud, every day. I'm becoming a better daughter, sister, friend and one day I will be an amazing wife and mother. I'm growing every day into a better home cook, a better blogger, an embracer of life, a more self-sufficient self and while I am pursuing new talents, I'm never forgetting the ones I already have. And I don't know if I could have consciously realized these things without losing the ground beneath my feet.

My rustic little individual pot pies

Weekend Breakfast

This morning when I woke up, in addition to my daily cup of coffee I decided it was tea time. I had recently been fortunate enough to find my absolute favorite tea, Lapsang Souchong, by chance and of course snatched it up. I have a deep reverent love for anything that smells smokey, like a wonderful fire without actually having a fire, and this tea is the epitome of that.

 My favorite candle scent is firewood, specifically Henri Bendels' and will seek them out in any season. Next to peonies and lavender it may be my favorite smell ever. Lapsang Souchong is just that scent too, the smokey firewood-y smell in a cup of tea. The story behind the tea is that in the Qing Dynasty, the last dynasty in China, the passage of armies would delay the drying of the tea leaves. In order to dry the leaves faster to satisfy demand, tea producers would dry the leaves over fires made from pine, resulting in a lovely, woody smell to the black tea.

One Rotisserie Chicken Please: Part 4 Stocks and Soups and Such

There's a list (of course) in my head of the meals I make exceptionally well. My turkey chili, my short ribs... and my chicken pot pie. It's so, well for lack of a better word... country, but so luxurious. It's decedent but yet all the vegetables say "I'm kind of healthy." It's a little sweet, but mostly savory, the creamy sauce soaked up into the flaky pastry in the most delicious way. But you can't have chicken pot pie without chicken stock and what better way to use up every single bit of that rotisserie chicken then turning it into chicken stock?

Stock was one of the first things we learned to make in my I.C.E. cooking class and were impressed upon exactly how important stock was, the instructor even sharing tales of how people were hired at certain nameless New York restaurants just to make the stock and god forbid they messed up, it would spell the end of their career at unsaid restaurant(s). So below is straight from my class book. Of course you can adjust with different herbs and spices but you can just as easily do that with whatever you're using the stock for later without polluting the whole stock. I like to keep it simple, as I never know exactly what I'll be using it for later.