Pretty Sassy

I was chatting with this cool guy at work.

Me: Hey when you gonna put that candy bowl back out, I miss it.
Him: I can’t, I’m on a diet.
Me: That’s great that your being so healthy, but maybe you can fill it with stuff you don’t like.
Him: I’ll still eat it.
Me: I bet you wouldn’t eat circus peanuts!
Him: What are those?
Me: Those horrid orange marshmallow-ish candys that are shaped like peanuts.
Him: Those are terrible.

That is why I would like to declare Circus Peanuts the worst candy in the universe.  In Junior High my friend Michelle convinced her now husband(yup, still happens) to kiss her by placing a circus peanut between her teeth and taunting him to bite it.  So beside Junior high romance, it has no purpose.  If you have a potential candidate as worst american candy, please let me know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circus_peanut

This weekend the mister and I had gone to the Culver City Surfas(a really cool chef supply store that also caters to the normal cook).   I had been further working on my great pursuit to make the worlds greatest, not remotely authentic paper wrapped chicken and needed some Chinese 5 Spice.

 The mister had not ever been to Surfas and was sort of blown away when we walked in, it’s high-end gourmet and serious resturant kitchen at the same time.

As soon as we got in the dude immediately needed to make use of the facilities which are near the test kitchen.  While in the test kitchen I talked to a chef who is using their kitchen to make some very delicious(I know I tried them) crustless kitchens to serve to a very prominent food buyer. 

While at the counter I spied packages of Little Flower Candy Company handmade vanilla marshmallows.  I had never had handmade marshmallows before.  My everyday favorite are the sugar-free La Nouba Marshmallows which are in taste and texture better than a jet-puffed.  After I plopped them on the counter the lady whispered “You are in for a real treat”, she told me there were excellent out of hand but out of this world in a beverage.  

This afternoon I plopped one in a cup of coffee and pulled it out to take a bite.  These marshmallows must have much lower melting points, because the marshmallow was that campfire liquid gooey without the burning napalm effect.   Oh man was it good.  I mean like really good.  It was creamy and dense and delicious.  The vanilla flavor was exquisite and without high fructose corn syrup it just had the cleanest taste profile ever.  It was like a little vanilla fairy was dancing on my tongue.

This are amazing.    I’m not a big jellybean fan.  But after my dance instructor handed me a handfull fo these to me I changed my tune.  It’s a super flavorfull sweet tart middle with a sort of lemon-head crust on the outside that reminds me of the chewy sweet tarts from a few years ago.  I bought the bag a few days ago and the dude and I have been fighting over them since.

 Really, they are worth it.  I want some now.

 Here is CandyBlogs review(which is so much more detailed than mine).

http://www.typetive.com/candyblog/item/sweetart_jelly_beans/

A little while ago I put in request for NPR Splendid Table contributer and author of the cookbooks A New Way To Cook(2001) and The Improvisational Cook(2006) Sally Schneider(aka the Improvisational Cook) for an email interview.   I was so excited that she agreed and even more excited to share her rich answers on life, cooking and make-up.

To me, my Rockstars have always been cooks and scientists.  Sally Schneider fits this mold as she is both cook and wonderful mad scientist.  She writes with her unique, more formula than cookbook, to teach the big picture behind the recipe.   So here is the interview!  Thank you Sally!

 Here are the questions
1. 5 favorite beauty products you can’t live without.
Kevin Aucoin Eyebrow Pencil. Laura Mercier Tinted Moisturizer, I’m still looking for the perfect lipstick but Mac’s Spice Pencil is a great all-purpose one. Can’t live w/o mascara but don’t have a favorite.

2. Do you use Wondra in your cooking for anything else but fake-frying?
I also use it to make a butterless base for souffle’s, which I make all the time i.e. Wondra and milk, whisked together, egg yolks added, with salt, pepper, nutmeg, then grated cheese and egg whites folded in….The recipe is at http://splendidtable.publicradio.org/recipes/light_cheesesouffle.shtml

3. Voges Mo’s Bacon Bar. Try it? Like it?
I’m dying to try it but haven’t found it yet. It’s an inspired idea: adding smoke and more fat to chocolate, if they get the right balance.

4. Junk food worth commiting crime for?
I’d kill for a good gougere, (a French style cheese puff made from choux pastry – eclair dough – baked with cheese in the batter) which is really hard to find and isn’t really junk food except that you need to eat them with cocktails. I also have a fondness for Eskimo Pies and malted milkshakes, and spoons of caramel (the jarred stuff used for ice cream sundaes, made without any scary additives) sprinkled with a tiny bit of sea salt OR mixed with peanut butter.

5. You’ve just graduated from highschool, what was the plan? Never had a plan. Just followed things along in a kind of zig-zag path (up the Amazon River and thinking I might be a photographer….) until I woke up from a dream knowing that I should cook (really!) and then followed that in all sorts of ways, from chef to caterer, to food stylist to journalist to cookbook author to here, doing my thing on American Public Media, writing in new territory, and about to launch a blog….

Note from Kelly: I must make a souffle now.  I must.

 Who the heck would spend $7.50 for a chocolate bar?

Me!  It’s chocolate and bacon.  But I should clarify.  Smokey applewood  bacon in 41% milk chocolate.  This bar ain’t for kiddies. 

I first heard about this delightful little bar on the MunchCast podcast from Powell’s Sweet Shop in Northern California.   During the episode Leo Laporte “accidentally” walks off from the premises of the candy store with a Mo’s Bacon Bar in his pocket and falls horribly in love.

I listened to it and thought “bacon and chocolate, that makes sense”.  Evidently most people who I talked about this with didn’t get the mystique.  They thought bacon and chocolate sounded strange.

So when I spotted the Vosges Mo’s Bacon bars at my local Whole Foods I grabbed one and forgot about it for a few days.

So the taste?  Well you know how sweet and salty are actually really good?  This is like that.  It’s a little like a chocolate bar with salty almonds, but more bacon-ey and smokey.  The chocolate is really good, it’s 41% cacao milk chocolate.  It’s really a wonderfull  treat, with or without bacon.    The bar itself has a pretty short shelf life(it’s bacon after all). 

If it sounds interesting, you should try it.  I give it an enthusiastic “YES”.

Kelly

 P.S.  If you are ever looking for the perfect gift for somebody that likes strange things.  It might be this

     Versus      

Here at prettysassy.com we get a lot of email.  A lot of email about which red pepper Jam or Jelly is the best.  It’s one of those things that people are nervous to talk about it.   I want to shed some light on this subject and may make you feel less trashy about your love of the spicy jewel.

While Grocery shopping I  spotted Reese’s Hot Pepper Jelly and Delicae Gourmet’s Roasted Red Pepper Jam and wondered..  Mmmmmn, which one is best?

I’m pretty sure I’m one of like 4 people who have a fondness for pepper jelly, so I figured finding someone elses review would be a lost cause.

So I conducted a formal testing by carefully layout out 6 townhouse crackers, topping them with a modest layer of Philadelphia Cream Cheese and slathering on either the Jelly or the Roasted Pepper Jam. 

I kept a freshly opened can of Diet Sunkist to ensure that my palate was properly cleansed between tests.

Reeses: Smoother consistency with tiny bits of seeds and of  red jalapeno scattered through.  From looks it reminds me of canned Cranberries.    The smell from the jar is almost all vinegar with a little smack from the peppers.  Spread on my cracker it looks pretty much like any other jam spread on a townhouse cracker.  The first thing I taste is sweet.  A tangy, over-the-top sugar high sweet that makes me feel like I’m eating cherry jell-o.  Then it runs hot.  Sort of kicks your tonsils on the way down.  It’s so candy-like, I want to take a spoon and dig in.  The sweet hot combination is very well balanced and it seems to turn on all the bells and whistles in your mouth as it goes down.

Delicae Roasted Red Pepper Jam: I open the jar and it looks like jarred bruschetta.  I see chunks of peppers and onions and slight bits of char(from the roasting I guess).  The texture is almost like a chutney, It’s pretty and more sophisticated than Reese’s.  On the cracker it looks like something that you might even serve.   It sort of piles on the cracker in an indulgent mound.  It smells just like pickled onions.  In fact this jam really reminds me more of a relish.   When I eat it, the sour and sweet really fight it out, making for an excellent balance.  It would make an interesting relish on a hamburger.

I really wanted a clear winner, but there isn’t.  They we’re both good.   Roasted Red Pepper Jam was far more sophisticated than the Sweet-Hot Reese’s but it all depends on the mood your in.
Kelly

I recently heard about a company in Los Angeles that makes artisinal, organic chocolate bars.  The company is BonBon and the buzz I hear is that these chocolate bars will make you want to cry with pure decadence.  They only make 2 bars(in milk or dark) right now a malt bar and a caramel nut bar.

The only downside(or upside if you don’t want to gain a gazillion artisinal pounds) is that at $5.oo bucks a bar it probably won’t be a bi-daily treat.

I really can’t stand it anymore and will need to order soon.

The owner of the site also runs a blog that also makes me drool.

Kelly: Who hopes Steve realizes that you can never plan to early for Valentines Day

The mister loves his beans.  Chili with beans, baked beans, refried beans, black beans, kidney beans and Mr. Bean. 

As the budding domestic goddess(don’t worry I’m not serious) I have been working to make the Mister some baked beans that he would proclaim “Better than the Can”

When I went seeking a recipe I found most relied on pre-made can beans that you doctored up with ketchup and BBQ sauce.

Always one for a challenge I tried the following two recipes.

This one is Tyler Florence.  I tried this first because..  It’s Tyler.     I have a feeling the recipe was written wrong because the beans ended up really dry(not enough liquid), burnt on the bottom and the massive amount of bacon made it greasy.

This one is from hillbillyhousewife.com and was pretty good, but took 5-7 hours.   I’m domestic, but I’m just not that domestic. 

After that I swallowed my pride and tried this recipe from Dave Liberman  of the food network.  Because it uses regular canned beans as a base it takes around and hour.  No domestic bean soaking and fiddling with the stove all day, but it is delicious.  I mean really good.  I mean lick the bowl, not-nuclear-sweet, meaty goodness(I think regular canned baked beans are super sweet).  The only change I made was adding a few(3-4) cups of water to make the beans softer.  I knew I hit it on the nose when the mister gazed at me lovingly and said “you have a little sauce on your nose, may I please have another bowl?”.

Catch geek boys with beany goodness. 

It was two days before I was suppose to take off for the holidays.

I’m in Target running down the aisles.  I’m frantically tossing the goods in my cart Sugar Cubes, stemmed glasses and some bottled water.

I pack it all in my car and gave it to my Dad.. Along with one other tiny thing.

A bottle of absinthewith special spoon.  I swear I didn’t get it from some underground source.  I got it from BevMo.  It was made legal earlier this year and I thought it to be a fitting thing for my father.  My father is not an 1800’s artist, he looks to play dress up for fun.

After seeing it he got very happy.  Later that afternoon he placed a few ounces in each of two glasses, dripped a bit of water through a sugar cube and we watched as white wisps swirled through the glass turning it from light emerald green to a milky, milky white. 

He and my brother said a toast and the result was “Black Licorice?”  After that they kept saying “NyQuil” and drinking very slowly whilst squinting.

They said that Van Gogh was under the influence of absinthe when he cut off his ear.

My brother threatened to cut off his, but he said it half-heartedly and just said it to make me feel better.  He didn’t mean it, and that was sad.  The green menace was sort of nasty and challenging to drink.  And nobody went crazy OR wrote poetry.

What a let down!

Kelly

Girls like pods.  Ipods, Tahitian Vanilla Pods and now hip girls like Coffee Pods.

The mister is also a geek, but prefers cold caffeine preparations(mainly Dr. Pepper and Bawls) over good old coffee. 

This initially led me to making way too much coffee all the time and then I stopped making coffee because it was a pain.  I didn’t stop drinking coffee, I just paid way to much every week for huge vats of latte.

When I got the Senseo pod coffee maker from a friend it started a new chapter in my caffeine laced life.

I also went to Smart and Final and bought a sleeve of coffee cups and plastic lids so I could pretend like I was drinking coffee I didn’t make. I also purchased some sugarfree syrups from netrition.com to give the whole business some credibility.

And it did, but there was the little issue of the pods.  They were expensive.  At around $5.00 for 18, I was clearly paying for convenience.  What just killed me was that I was losing out on variety.

But my problem was that the beans in those pods were okay, but “Irish Cream” was about as “OUT THERE” as the grocery store got.  I like the crazy bourbon  infused coffee beans I bought in the Caribbean, but I couldn’t have it with the pods. 

I must have done a lot of complaining, because that year for Christmas I was given two pod alternatives.  These were the Ecopad and the Perfect Pod.

The Ecopad is decidedly less sexy than the Perfect Pod.  It’s a reusable pod that you fill up, brew and rinse out.  It retails at about $6.00.  If you drink coffee a lot your pad will be perpetually damp and when the pad is damp, coffee seems to stick everywhere on the pod but not inside the little well.  Also, you can’t make more than two pods ahead of time, which means no stockpile.  However, there is nothing to throw away so it’s friendlier to the earth and you never need to buy more filters so it’s cheaper in the long run.  But if you are like me and find eye-hand coordination before coffee to be difficult(and forget being mentally aware enough to make the pod the night before), it might be a pain.

The Perfect Pod is a set of pre-glued paper filters and a  little heated box that seals the pods.   The starter set is $40.00 and makes 4o pods.  A refill pack of pods is about $5.00 for 40 pods.  This means that the cost is about 1/2(not including coffee) of commercial Senseo or Maxwell pods.  The good part about these is you can stockpile a mess of these pods made on a Sunday afternoon and not be worried about AM pre-coffee deadness.  However the box that holds everything is pretty big and can be a pain to store in a tight LA apartment.

Basically if money isn’t the issue and you crave variety, the Perfect Pod rocks.  However, if you are going for the cheapest possible pod solution, Ecopad is your guy.   I end up using a mix of the two.  If I’ve run out of premade pods or crave something different,  I’ll use the EcoPod.  Most of the rest of the time I use the Perfect Pod.

 Happy Podding,
Kelly