Night at the Guthrie

I'm rushing to get this done before midnight and a little tired to boot, so excuse the brevity. Tonight I went to see a play at the Guthrie Theater. Here are some views from the endless bridge during intermission:

The Gold Medal Flour Sign - an iconic sign in Minneapolis. The Guthrie is located right in the old milling district and just down a little from the Mill City Museum (and next door to the Mill City Farmer's Market!)

A view of the "new" 35W bridge that they built after the collapse. I've never see it at night from this angle, all lit up.

Here is the Stone Arch Bridge and, although its hard to see, the Pillsbury Flour sign lit in the background.

We went to Spoonriver for a post-theater treat. It's operated by Brenda Langdon, who helped to found the Mill City Farmer's market and who is an outspoken advocate of organic, local and in season food.

My friend and I split the "bete noir", which was a slice of dense flourless chocolate cake, served with white chocolate and passion fruit curd on the plate and garnished with a sesame cookie and small chocolate-covered crispies. The pic isn't that great (lighting in restaurants is always sub-par for taking photos) but it was delicious!

I almost forgot to take a pic of the Guthrie itself. And did I forget to mention that I enjoyed the play? Below is another pic of Gold Medal Flour sign, much later in the evening and getting close to my bedtime. Time to head home :)

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie and Links

As promised, here is a link to the recipe I used for the Strawberry Rhubarb Pie I made last week. This is really only a recipe for the filling so just use whatever crust you would normally use (I've had good luck with the frozen pre-made ones - just maybe compare the amount of salt on the labels to avoid the overly salty ones):

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Rhubarb-and-Strawberry-Pie/Detail.aspx

There are a ton of rhubarb recipes floating around the interwebs right now. Here are a few that look really good:

http://smittenkitchen.com/2010/05/rustic-rhubarb-tarts/

http://www.simplebites.net/spotlight-ingredient-rhubarb-recipe-rhubarb-upside-down-cake/

http://www.atthefarmersmarket.com/2010/05/rhubarb-curd.html

Banana "Ice Cream" Results

So, I tried the one ingredient (banana) "ice cream" from the previous post. The results are in and......it's seriously delicious, creamy and very, very easy. You do need a food processor, which we only recently acquired in my household. This is great, though, because we ALWAYS have bananas and soon it will be too hot to bake banana bread (yes, we live on the second floor with no ac!)

www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/stay-cool/how-to-make-creamy-ice-cream-with-just-one-ingredient-093414



I would never have guessed that this was simply frozen bananas that had been processed. It has a strong banana flavor but has the texture of a soft serve ice cream. I sprinkled some cinnamon over the top but am definitely going to try lots of add-ins. I'm thinking cocoa powder, nuts, chocolate chips, other fruit - there are so many options!

Banana Bonanza

*this is a pic of nanerpus from Denny's. Please note - my bananas don't have googly eyes...or mustaches

I have a bonus bunch of bananas just sitting on my counter, crying out to be used up. Chef was going to throw out the overripe bananas, those too mushy for fruit tarts (or put them in the piggy bucket, which is what we usually do with edible scraps) and I volunteered to find them a more suitable home. Imagine wasting beautiful overripe bananas like that.

Anywho, I'm thinking of making this banana "ice cream" from the link below. Has anyone ever tried it? Or there's always the good old standby of banana bread, but that's a little tougher given the bareness of our cupboard right now (see yesterday's post if you don't know what I mean.)

http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/stay-cool/how-to-make-creamy-ice-cream-with-just-one-ingredient-093414

Chocolate Cake You Make When ....

.....your fridge is ALMOST bare. Seriously, this cake has NO eggs, NO butter, and NO milk. I haven't been doing a lot of baking at home so we haven't been buying things like butter, milk, or extra eggs (they just end up going bad, sadly). I wanted to make a little snack, though, since we didn't really bake anything today in class (we made puff pastry dough for later use.) Anyway, the leavening in the cake is provided from the chemical reaction between the acid in the vinegar and the alkali in the baking soda.

This cake is nice and moist and tastes great - not too sweet. I also made an icing from sweetened condensed milk, powdered sugar, and dutch-processed cocoa powder. I didn't measure but just keep adding a little of each until I got a pourable consistency. It will set up pretty quickly once it's poured onto the slightly warm cake.

Here is the recipe I used: http://www.allrecipes.com/Recipe/Crazy-Cake/Detail.aspx

Goodbye, Weekend (I hardly knew ye)

I had to work most of the weekend so had hardly any time to do anything fun. Here's another photo essay - this time scenes from our walk around Minnehaha Park. We're going to be moving out of neighborhood soon so we want to make sure to visit all of our favorite places while we can.

Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood