USA Travel Review: Chicago Part 3

The last part of my 2015 USA road trip - part 3 of Chicago.

A few months before our trip we’d bought a Weber barbecue which my fiancé loves (and I love it because it means in the summer, he does a lot of the cooking!). I was surprised to find there is a Weber Grill restaurant in Chicago, set up by the people who invented that brand of barbecue, and it was just down the street from our hotel! I checked the menu online to make sure my future mother-in-law, who is a vegetarian, would find something to eat but she seemed happy with it.

 

The restaurant looked busy but it is huge so we were seated very quickly. You can see the chefs using the Weber barbecues in the kitchen so I spent a few minutes standing at the bar watching, which was pretty cool. It’s actually a fairly high end restaurant in terms of the food and prices, but the atmosphere is very relaxed. The menu is quite extensive and I found it hard to choose!

There are grill-fired pizzas (which I tried doing myself last summer), salads, seven types of burger, some ‘fire inspired’ main courses including beer can chicken which I also made myself not long ago, grilled bourbon salmon, parmesan-crusted tilapia and pasta margherita (the tomatoes are grilled). Then you get on to the ‘backyard barbecue’ section, which has some of their signature dishes – Weber’s BBQ beef brisket, and BBQ ribs – and that’s before you get to the steaks, which have their own section on the menu. The side orders sounded amazing as well and I would have happily have eaten most things on the menu!

I had a combo of BBQ ribs, which were so tender the meat fell off the bone, and the beef brisket, which is smoked over hickory for 14 hours. It came with two sides so I chose garlic mashed potatoes and broccoli which was so good. It was a shame we were too full for dessert as they sounded amazing as well!

The cocktails were amazing too and I had a 'flirtini' - a mixture of Chambord, raspberry vodka, pineapple juice and Prosecco. I might have to make that at home some time!

 

 

For our last bit of sightseeing we did an architectural boat tour with Chicago Line Cruises which was recommended by the concierge in our hotel. It lasted 75 minutes and gave us some fabulous views of the city. It wasn't cheap - about $50 per person - but I would recommend it. The river goes right through the centre of the city so you have all the landmark buildings on each side with great photo opportunities. You can move around the boat easily to take pictures - it was much better than just being on the water taxi to the Navy Pier. The tour guide was excellent and I learnt a lot about the city and the architecture.

 

The boat has free Starbucks coffee, soft drinks and cookies on board which was a nice touch (and the cookies were really good!).

 

Bundle of Joy Baby Card

I made this card for a friend's new baby girl; it had to be a quick make as she had a daughter and I realised I didn't have any suitable cards!

I started off with a pink card blank and a pink die cut heart which I placed in the middle of the card. I had one die cut pink pram left from a set so mounted this on top of the heart. I then used a transfer for the wording to write 'congratulations' at the top and 'bundle of joy' at the bottom.

I'm sending this to the card making challenge on Crafty Sentiments as their theme is 'anything goes'.  Through the Craftroom Door also doesn't have a theme this time so I'm sharing this card with that challenge too.

Stencilling a design on a cake

I'm enjoying my wedding cake decorating class even though we are already in week 5 and haven't actually been near a wedding cake yet (even a fake one). My main issue with the course though is that it was described as "intermediate level" - i.e. for people with some cake decorating experience - but we have been doing really basic things I would describe as beginners' level. Take stencilling, for instance - I'd never done it before so it was useful having it explained and having the chance to practice. For me, part of the reason for taking the class is to have a couple of hours set aside a week to focus on practicing cake decorating, which I wouldn't find time for at all otherwise.

 

But to spend half a class aimed at an intermediate level being taught stencilling was a bit disappointing. Do you want to know how to do stencilling? Well, mix some royal icing, colour it, place a stencil on your cake, and spread the icing over with a palette knife. Then remove the stencil - ta dah! Hardly rocket science - and hardly an intermediate level class. We could have covered that in 20 minutes and then spent an hour working on decorating a covered dummy cake so even if the technique was simple, by the end we would have a nicely decorated cake.

Place the stencil on the covered cake or board

spread over a thin layer of royal icing using a palette knife

remove stencil

Instead, we continue to work on a covered board, using the same board we'd used in previous weeks as you can see from the picture. I had my own set of stencils though I'd never used them, so chose a leaf pattern and added some green to my royal icing. I used a bit of masking tape to fasten the stencil to the board, as you don't want it to move, and spread the icing over the top. You want to spread the icing as thinly as possible. Carefully remove the stencil and you can see it does look good.

After the class I tried stencilling on an actual cake and unsurprisingly found it was a lot more difficult than doing it on a cake board, so I wish we had done it on a cake in class! You can see how mine turned out here.

We spent the second half of the class being shown how to use a Garrett frill cutter, which I already owned and had used before but not correctly as it turned out, so I will do a separate post on this.

Meal Planning Monday Week 9

Monday
leftover chicken from Sunday for me, gammon for him

Tuesday
probably working late

Wednesday
Lunch: pasta - use spiralizer?
Dinner: sandwich - on my cake decorating course

Thursday
Chicken/turkey provencale (from DietPlan website)

Friday
white fish, hollandaise sauce or similar for me, sausage and chips for him

Saturday
Lunch: on a train en route to a wedding hair and makeup trial
Dinner: out with my bridesmaid

Sunday
Lunch: TBA - had expected to be out but will now be home
Dinner: maple and tarragon pork chops and sweet potato traybake from Sainsbury's magazine

Love Food Hate Waste: Food Diary Project and Tips

 

Did you know that the average family in the UK throws away £60 worth of food and drink every month? That sounds like a huge amount, but those are the official stats from the government’s Love Food Hate Waste campaign.

 

I recently took part in a project run by my local council to raise awareness of, and reduce, food waste. I had to keep a diary of what food I wasted for a week, and then go to an information session at the council office, then do another food diary for a week.

 

Love Food Hate Waste reckons that we are throwing away a quarter of the food we buy. I’m sure most people don’t waste a quarter of the food they buy from Tesco every week (having said that, I do know someone who throws away an awful lot every week) but just think about when you sort out your cupboards and find things lurking at the back that are out of date… or your child leaves half their packed lunch and it goes in the bin…. Or you cook too much pasta every single time as you can never work out how much you need (I’m certainly guilty of that!). It all adds up, and the government wants us to be more mindful of what we are buying, and cooking.

 

It’s not just about saving money for households, though that is a big part of it. Wasting food also means using unnecessary resources (money, energy, time etc) when it comes to producing the food (everything from heating greenhouses to running factories), transporting it to stores and so on.

 

My downfall is buying a specific ingredient for a recipe – eg fresh dill – and then not needing it again, but forgetting/not having time to take it out of the fridge and portion it up and put in the freezer. By the time I remember I had dill from a recipe last week it’s gone off!

 

The Love Food Hate Waste website has recipes to use up leftovers, a suggested 2-week meal planner using similar ingredients in different recipes across the week, a portion planner tool so you don’t cook too much and all sorts of information and tips about reducing food waste. It’s well worth a look!

 

Do you know the difference between ‘best before’ and ‘use by’ dates? Best before refers to quality –the manufacturer or seller can only guarantee the food will be at its best until that date, but it should be safe to eat after the date. Use by on the other hand does refer to safety – even if food looks or smells OK you shouldn’t eat it after this date – though I have to say I’m not that strict with myself, preferring not to waste something if it’s only a day over.

 

The session I attended at the council covered a lot of this, and a lot of what I heard was obvious, e.g. take a shopping list when you go to the supermarket, check the cupboards before you go. It also wasn’t hard to work out when quizzed what the main reasons were for people wasting food, or some ways to use up various leftovers (I think the lady running the session was surprised when I said you could use up leftover mashed potato in cake!).

 

I did pick up some useful tips in the session though, like: keep fruit (other than bananas) in the fridge, and label food when you put it in the freezer both with the name and the date – you are only supposed to store certain foods for certain amounts of time, even in the freezer.

 

I always thought if you bought fresh food and wanted to freeze it, you had to freeze it on the day of purchase, but apparently it’s perfectly fine to freeze right up until the use by date. So if you buy a pack of chicken breasts and think you will use them all before the use by date, but then your plans change and you have a couple left, they can still be frozen. This is a very useful tip for me!

 

Comparing my food diary from the first week to the second, I found I had wasted less food. I think because I was filling in the food diary I was making a conscious effort, but things like freezing leftovers quickly becomes second nature – and I often take leftovers from dinner to work for my lunch the next day!

Spiralized Vegetable Pad Thai

I love the idea of adding spiralized vegetables to a ‘normal’ recipe – they work really well in stir-fries particularly if you don’t like a lot of the veg that you get in stir-fry packet mixes or would normally add to the pan, like beansprouts, mange tout or mini corn on the cob. You can spiralize all sorts of veg you wouldn’t normally add to a stir fry to add some bulk and make sure you get an extra portion of your 5 a day!

 

My future mother-in-law came round for dinner this week and whenever we eat at hers we have a Thai takeaway, and we both always order a Pad Thai - chicken and prawn for me, and vegetable for her.

 

As I made a really good Pad Thai not long before I decided to use the same recipe again. This time however I left out the beansprouts (which are a key ingredient I know!) as my MIL doesn't like them, and put in some mange tout that she does like. I then got out my spiralizer and spiralized some carrot, butternut squash and mooli (a veg from the radish family I discovered recently).

 

 

I cooked the butternut squash first as I thought it would take longer, then the mooli and the carrot. I cooked some chicken pieces separately for me and some tofu for my MIL and added these into the plates at the end. With the delicious Pad Thai sauce, some noodles and a sprinkling of chopped peanut over the top it made a delicious meal.

 

 

I'm entering this into the Spiralizer Saturday challenge I an running each month. Link up your own Spiralizer recipes!

 

 

I'm also sending this to Meat Free Mondays hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes, and to Extra Veg, hosted by Michelle at Utterly Scrummy and Helen at Fuss Free Flavours.

 

 

 

Restaurant Review: Jamies Wine Bar, Bishopsgate, London

Jamies Wine Bar on Bishopsgate is nestled in between shops on a raised walkway, and while I’d walked along there many times I’d never thought to go in. It seemed a good place to meet a colleague for lunch as the menu looked good, but really I chose it for convenience – and also because staff at my company get a 20% discount there.

 

 

The lunch menu is extensive with dishes divided into small plates, large plates, burgers, platters, sandwiches and extras. There was also a daily special menu with one dish each day, which my friend had (shepherd’s pie). I ordered a “Jamie’s special”- a ciabatta with chicken fillet, bacon, melted cheese and mayo. The chicken was chunky and made the sandwich feel very substantial, but there was far too much mayo – it was almost all I could taste and I don’t remember seeing or tasting any cheese. It’s a shame as it would have been a very good sandwich otherwise.

 

The food isn’t cheap either – the sandwich was £8.95, and if I’d wanted fries with it that would have been an extra £3.25. It would have been fine if I had used my 20% staff discount, but I forgot!

Meat Free Monday: Fettuccine Alfredo (sort of) with Cheddar and Stilton

For the second Meat Free Monday in January I decided to make a pasta dish, but wanted something more interesting than just pasta and Dolmio sauce - and something that my fiancé would still consider a 'proper meal'.

Fettuccine Alfredo is a pasta dish tossed with Parmesan cheese and butter - one of those simple dishes that needs to be done really well. I didn't have any Parmesan but did have other cheese in the fridge that needed using so I decided to make my own take on this, with Cheddar and Stilton! So it isn't really Fettuccine Alfredo at all, more of a cheesy pasta!

 

I'd seen a few recipes for Fettuccine Alfredo online that used double cream but I wanted to make a healthier version (I've lost 5 pounds in the first two weeks of this year - who needs Slimming World when you've got a wedding dress to get into?!) so substituted Quark instead (an almost-flavourless curd cheese you can get in most supermarkets).

So my recipe was:
Bring a pan of salted water to the boil and cook some tagliatelle.

In a separate pan, melt a little butter and stir in 2 tbsp. plain flour to make a roux. Gradually add milk, stirring, until you have a smooth sauce.

Bring to a simmer and add grated cheddar and stilton to taste. Add a tub of Quark (this made enough for three portions).

 Stir until you have a lovely thick cheesy sauce and pour over the pasta.

I served this with some broccoli and some garlic bread for my fiancé; I knew I'd have more luck persuading him to eat a vegetarian pasta dish if there was garlic bread too!

I'm sending this to the Meat Free Monday challenge, hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes. Jacqueline also runs the Food Blog Diary which is the place to go to find out about all these blog challenges!

Mango, Papaya & Passionfruit Yogurt Gluten-Free Cookies

I like to bake things to take into work but we are a pretty small team which, combined with the fact that I’m on a pre-wedding diet, means I’m not really making a lot of cakes for work. But recently I’ve heard a few people say they must remember to buy some biscuits to bring in or something so I thought it was a good excuse to bake. I remembered at 10pm one evening that we had a team meeting the next day so decided to do something very quick and simple, which also had to be gluten free for one of my colleagues.

 

I still had some Onken mango, papaya and passionfruit yogurt left from this fruity yogurt brulee

and wondered if you could put yogurt into cookies, since you can put it into cake. Turns out you can! I created my own recipe using basic ingredients plus the yogurt and they turned out well, though they were absolutely huge and looked more like rock cakes than cookies – they actually have a very cakey texture which is not quite what I was expecting but was really nice. The only gluten-free flour I had was self raising so I wondered if it would have been better using plain and I would have ended up with flat cookies, but I do actually like the way these turned out. These are great straight from the oven and also really good for breakfast!

 

Soft and fruity yogurt cookies – an original recipe by Caroline Makes

 

1 and ¼ cups gluten free self-raising flour

¾ cup caster sugar

1/3 cup Onken mango, papaya and passionfruit yogurt (or any other flavour)

50g butter or marg, softened

1 egg

 

Preheat oven to 180C. Mix the flour and sugar and stir in the yogurt. Then beat in the butter and the egg until you have a sticky dough.

 

 

Line a baking sheet with baking paper and place spoonfuls of the dough onto the paper, flattening them slightly. If you do them as big as I did you will have huge cookies, but then one of these and a cup of tea makes a very nice breakfast!

Bake for 15-20 minutes depending on the size - they should look baked but still be slightly soft.

 

I’m sharing these soft and fruity yogurt cookies with Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker as the letter I have chosen is Y.

 

 

Restaurant Review: The Whispering Moon Wetherspoons, Wallington, Surrey

I used to really like Wetherspoons when I was younger – there was a huge one in Cambridge where I went to university inside a converted cinema, and when I was on my post-grad journalism course in London, we would regularly congregate around one giant table in a Wetherspoons in Islington. But I guess over the past few years I’ve gotten more used to nice gastropubs. I have nothing against the food in Wetherspoons and I think the choice of meals available, the fact that they were ahead of the curve at adding calorie counts to the menu, and the very accessible prices are great. But there’s something about the pubs themselves that I just don’t enjoy any more.

 

I reviewed the Grapes, a Wetherspoon pub in Sutton, in 2014 and wasn’t that impressed by the décor. This time I went to the Whispering Moon in Wallington, just across the road from the train station.

 

On Wednesday nights at the moment I’m taking a cake decorating course in Wallington, and don’t really have time to go home from work and then back out to college – usually I get to Wallington half an hour before the class, and either take a sandwich with me or pop into Tesco to buy something to eat on the way. This time however I managed to get an earlier train, and had almost a whole hour to kill. I didn’t see the point of sitting in an empty classroom, and we are not allowed to eat in the classroom anyway –plus, I’d only been able to have sandwiches for lunch as I’d been on a training course (I usually try to have something hot so I can then have a sandwich in the evening before class).

 

So I decided to treat myself to dinner in a pub and thought that the Whispering Moon would be quick (which it was), cheap (which it was) and a nice place to sit and pass some time (which it wasn’t).
 

 

I found a table and as there were no menus, I went to get one from the bar – and realised when I got back to my table that the menu was sticky, which wasn’t very nice. I went back to the bar to order my food; I paid less than £8 I think for a lasagne and a drink, which came to my table less than ten minutes later, delivered by a pleasant young waiter. The lasagne came on a plate with a side salad in a small bowl and a jug of salad dressing which I thought was good – to allow customers to add as much as they liked. The lasagne was pretty cheap tasting though – it reminded me of a ready meal and the edges had been overcooked so were inedible. It wasn’t actually a bad meal for what it was – if I had been able to make it home and back before my class, I would only have had time to bung a ready meal in the microwave, and this is pretty much what it tasted like.
 

The pub was quite noisy even for 6.30 on a Wednesday night with people shouting across the pub to each other – I was glad I was ensconced in a corner but despite still having some time to kill before the class I decided not to linger any longer and sit instead in the quiet classroom. As I said, I have nothing against Wetherspoons for a cheap meal, but I don't really spend much time in them any more.

Meal Planning Monday Week 8

Last week's meal plan was changed several times due to me working late and my fiancé being ill for a couple of days, then instead of having his mum round on Saturday we went out for dinner instead - everywhere was doing set menus on Valentine's day but with nothing my fiancé particularly liked to eat and at double the usual cost, so we decided to go out for dinner on the 13th and spend the 14th doing something romantic - finishing off our wedding invitations! And also at the cinema watching Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - just to show what an awesome fiancé I am!

So that means this week's meal plan has several meals that I was going to cook last week but didn't.

Monday
Was planning spaghetti bolognese but after a long day at work I won't be home til nearly 10pm and dinner was a sandwich on the train.

Tuesday
stuffed chicken with pesto and cream cheese

Wednesday
with my future mother in law - Pad Thai

Thursday
chicken and tarragon casserole from Oxo book

Friday
burger and chips, salad for me

Saturday
Lunch Bacon and Cheddar scrolls from Sainsbury's magazine
Dinner Mexican spiced lamb chops with charred butternut salsa from Sainsbury's magazine (using steak for him as he doesn't eat lamb)

Sunday
Lunch Breakfast burrito with scrambled egg, bacon, hash brown
Dinner: Moroccan style chicken from Sainsbury's magazine

Chocolate Brownie Valentine's Cake with Stencilled Hearts

It feels like it's been ages since I've made a proper cake so I decided to make one for my fiancé for Valentine's Day - I also wanted the chance to try out one of my cake stencils with a heart pattern that I'd never used before.

We'd just covered stencilling in my wedding cake decorating class and I'd written the blog post but forgotten to publish it so you'll have to hang on to read more about the technique - for this blog post I will concentrate more on the cake itself.

I used a recipe from the Great British Bake Off Big Book of Baking, for a "classic chocolate fudge sandwich cake". I filled it differently and decorated it differently, and both layers of the cake did sink when I took them out of the oven, which was odd as my cakes don't usually do that and I followed the recipe exactly. I thought the cake reminded me of a chocolate brownie in texture which is why I've given it this name; it was kind of chewy (in a good way) and tasted very good - I had a small slice just to try it, and think I will pack the rest of it off to my fiancé for his work colleagues (some of whom are coming to the wedding so there's no harm in trying to win them over!).

You can find the full recipe online here, so I won't repeat it. I didn't split my cake into four layers and instead just used chocolate buttercream to fill it and to spread over the top and around the sides, as I only wanted a thin layer of coating as I was covering the cake with fondant. I found that half the amount of the quantity in the recipe was plenty, and I actually used milk chocolate rather than plain as I generally prefer it, but I decided afterwards that plain would have been better in this recipe.

So I followed the recipe for the cake exactly and then for the buttercream used:
150g icing sugar
75g milk chocolate, melted
75g butter, softened
which I beat all together to make a buttercream consistency.

Melting chocolate and butter

 

Beating the mixture

Two pans about to go in the oven

And after baking - both sank in the middle

I covered the bottom layer with buttercream

The two layers stacked very neatly on top of each other - this is a good-sized cake

Crumb coating of buttercream around the sides and on the top

Covering with white sugarpaste

Mixing some royal icing with gel colour and getting ready to spread

Here's the stencil I used - it fits neatly onto the top of the cake. You have to stick it down with tape or it will move.

Spreading the icing over the stencil

And here it is! The icing was a bit thick in places because the top of the cake wasn't completely flat, which means there were some small gaps around the edge of the stencil shapes but I don't think it's too bad for a first attempt.

I added a pink ribbon and tied it in a bow around the front of the cake

 

And finally placed the cake on a heart-shaped cake board I already had. My fiancé thought it was cute and thought the chocolate cake was particularly good.

Do you fancy a slice?

I'm sharing this with We Should Cocoa, hosted by Choclette at Tin and Thyme, as her theme this month is butter.

I'm also sending this to Love Cake, hosted by Ness at JibberJabberUK, where the theme is "the month of cake".

And also to Simply Eggcellent, hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen, as this month "anything goes".

And finally I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen, as it's Valentine's day of course.