Aventuras, continued.: Food and Friends

Most of the time I think people who post pictures of food on Facebook are annoying, so I suppose writing a blog about it is even worse! If that's the case, this entry officially makes me a hypocrite. But, the adventures of my life this week have seemed to center around food, so, away we ago...

First food adventure: Making Asian pork-filled dumplings from scratch. This was a real project, not for the faint of heart, and brought me back to the one time my mom and I tried to cook pierogies from scratch and ended up doing more cursing than eating. You'd be shocked how little filling you can put in each dumpling. I'm telling you, it was not even a teaspoon. And if you get a little too aggressive, they break and won't seal. Gah, so many wasted wrappers! These came out delicious, albeit a little bit ugly, but in the end I decided that the frozen ones from the super market are just as good and don't take two hours to make.


Pork dumplings take over my tiny kitchen

Second food adventure: I traveled to the NYC area this past week for work and was lucky enough to hang out with my college roomie and dear friend Stacey! She always plays a great NYC tour guide, and this time we started our evening at the High Line, a public park in Chelsea build on an abandoned stretch of elevated rail road track. It was really cool and a beautiful night! But the real adventure was dinner at Stacey's pick: Max Brenner's Chocolate by the Bald Man. The restaurant blends chocolate factory and fine dining and we ate an embarrassing amount of food, and of course, chocolate! Check out the chocolate in action:

A beautiful evening to look over the Hudson!

Yeah, I'll have some of that.

Third food adventure: Today, I finally took a much-anticipated cooking class in downtown DC with a new friend from book club, Kate. We signed up for a gluten-free baking class, and although I'm certainly not a gluten-free eater, I was excited to learn about ingredients and techniques that I wouldn't normally use. The class was part of a series from Living Social, and if you have the ability to sign up for classes in your city, I highly recommend it. I was pleasantly surprised to see how delicious our treats came out, and how applicable the techniques were to non-gluten baking as well: for example, how to make a good meringue and fold it into a batter, or the right way to boil and peel fresh fruit to use in a tart. I had a blast and our food was so delicious! Many thanks to the instructor and chef, Emma, who owns the Happy Tart bakery in Alexandria.