TW Amigos! Bien!

There is a restaurant in Howell that I personally adore, called TW Friends. I've tried alot of food on their menu, and I love it all. I have fantasies about their Smoked Salmon appetizer. Kid you not.

At any rate, they have a sister restaurant called TW Amigos, and I finally convinced my fiance that we needed to go!

Nice restaurant. Sort of at an awkward place - the strip mall is a little weird to get into - but very nice. Open space, done in lots of rich wood tones. Nicely decorated.

I got the Ultimate Burrito. Refried beans, beef, chicken and chorizo. Smothered in lettuce, tomato, onion, sour cream, hot sauce and jalapenos. Kid you not, they actually request on the menu that you not alter it when you order it, because it's "already perfect".

I generally think that the word Ultimate is overused, and I won't lie, I think it was here too. It was large. Not really the best burrito I've eaten EVER. Pretty up there though. The flavors of the three meats meld much better then you'd think they would, well sauced, nice feel in your mouth, tasty and even.

And it was big enough that it lasted me through dinner on Sunday and lunch on Monday! Yeah, baby! :)

More Delicious Farmers Market Finds!

Took another trip to the Ann Arbor Farmers Market this week. One of these times, I'll remember to take my camera, and take good pictures. Love the Farmers Market. LOVE!

Got another round of City Goat goat cheese from Zingermans Creamery. Good stuff. Good, good, good. I actually think about it all week. Is that weird? Probably. Hee! I get cravings for the stuff - really! There's tons of fresh asparagus at the market, maybe next week I'll try the two together? Aah, experiments! :)

Last time I was at the Farmer Market, I got some Apple Glaze from Sansonetti Farms, and I have to tell you - I missed them! They weren't there, and I was really looking forward to seeing them. I've seriously tried their Apple Glaze with everything I could think of - it's good with everything! I've tried it with Mexican food, I've tried it on pizza, I've tried it with Stir Fry. It's good stuff!

I did find a new booth at the market, Pillar Farms. They had authentic Mexican lunch - tamales, fried plantains, hibiscus tea (I'm not sure how authentic that it, but it sure sounds good!), and more. I didn't want to go for the full out lunch, because I had inlaws coming into town that I knew would want to eat, so I got a side of the fried plantains.

I gotta admit - I just don't get it! It's not my first time having plantains, and while I've never had them and thought they were downright horrible, I've never eaten them and gone "Oh, I can't wait until I get to have that again!"

So I'm sure the lovely girls at the Pillar Farms booth did nothing wrong, and I'll probably go back this week and try the full out lunch, but I just didn't get that excited about the plantains.

I also got a loaf of fresh bread. I actually made French Toast with it this morning. I had read in one of my books that the origins of French Toast were to use the milk and egg to rehydrate the bread so they could still eat it. I left the fresh bread on the counter in the bag overnight, and this morning sawed myself off a few pieces, and had some french toast.

So crazy good. Crazy, crazy good! :)

And naturally, I had my two year old with me, so we had to make a stop at the snow cone booth again. :)

Check them out online:

Zingermans Creamery

They are also on Facebook. Worth the trip, all by themselves! :)

Book Club At The Library...Oh, They Are Making This Too Easy!

So I was just at the library with my two year old, and they had the ads up for the summer time book club.

I am SO in the adult club.

For the adults, it's a series of books, audio books and seminars that you complete, and the ones with the highest completion rate win a special class.

Oh, did I mention that the theme for this summers book club is COOKING?! And that one of the seminars is on CHOCOLATE?! And the special class is a cooking class with a local chef?!

Oh, dude. Bring it on.

Interesting Pasta Lunch!

I've been a food slacker the last few days. Been cooking on the "let's make some space in the cabinets!" plan, so that tends to lead to pretty pedestrian stuff. Heh.

At any rate, I had a really interesting lunch today.

I went to Leo's Coney Island in Grand Blanc, MI, and I had a Pasta Greek Salad and Lemon Rice Soup.

Why is this interesting?

I have tried to take things that are traditionally salads, and turn them into pasta salads, and always failed.

Pasta Greek salad takes all the things you know about Greek salads - olives, feta cheese, beets, and the rest...and puts them on pasta. It worked suprisingly well! I couldn't stop eating it! The dressing was good, not to vinegary, the vegetables were fresh, and the noodles were soft. And I know that seems like a weird thing to say, but I've got a favorite restaurant where I can't order the pasta, because they leave it just a little north of al dente. Eesh. I know that it's supposed to stick to your teeth, but really?

Anyway, I'm all off track. Heh.

The Lemon Rice soup? I don't know why I keep trying. Lemon just isn't an appealing soup flavor! And I keep thinking it's going to get better, and it's just not! I need to stop!

Leo's Coney Island, for the note, is a good place. Good food, fast service, reasonable prices (I didn't see anything on the menu over $10). Recommended, for sure!

Now, having had the pasta greek salad, I TOTALLY want to copy the recipe! :)

Coffee Cake...In A Jiffy!

So I've blogged a couple of times about this funny Betty Crocker's Bisquick Cookbook that I got at the librarys booksale, and at end of the day, I just couldn't turn it down. I made the Banana Coffee Cake. The last few weeks, we've bought bananas at the store and not really eaten them, so I'm eyeing these rapidly browning bananas, and I went "Aah, what the heck?"

The recipe:

2 cups Bisquick baking mix
1/4 cup sugar
3 tbsp butter or margarine, softened
1 egg
1/4 cup milk
3/4 cup mashed ripe bananas
1/2 cup chopped nuts
Creamy Icing and chopped nuts for topping

Creamy Icing:

1/3 cup confectioners sugar
2 teaspoons milk

Combine baking mix, sugar, butter, egg, milk, banana and 1/2 cup nuts; beat vigorously 1/2 minute.

Spread batter in greased round layer pan, 9x11 1/2 inches.

Bake 20 to 25 minutes. While warm, spread with Creamy Icing and sprinkle with nuts. Serves 8.

Can I tell you guys - this recipe was crazy good, and crazy easy. Moist and soft, you could taste the banana running through it, and taste the nice warmth from the nuts. I used walnuts because that was what I had in the house, but you could totally vary the taste and texture by changing the nuts you use.

I also liked this recipe because it was SO easy. I have a two and a half year old, and he gets so excited to get to come in the kitchen and cook with mama, and this is one we could totally do together. And a hearty thumbs up for that!

I had to make some slight adjustments to the recipe - I found out after the batter was completely mixed that I didn't have a cake pan, so I had to bake in the five small bread tins that I had. lol - it's really true! So that threw off my baking time as well. So if you adjust like I did, watch out for that. At 20 minutes, my bread pans were basically still batter.

The only beef I really had with the recipe was the frosting. I just didn't feel like it added to it at all. The recipe called for the frosting to be applied while the cake was still warm, and it completely melded into the recipe - you didn't get any added sweetness, and the banana provided enough moisture on its own, so you didn't need the frosting for that either. So when I make this again, and trust me, I will, I'll probably take a pass on the frosting.

Cookbook Finds...

I went to the library book sale yesterday (and today!) and made some really interesting cookbook finds.

Betty Crocker's Bisquick Cookbook? Oh yeah, baby! Copyrighted in 1971, it's actually something I've never really seen before - the recipes are seperated out by Holidays. It includes jems like the "Christmas Biscuit Tree", "Orange Crunchies", "Hot Cross Buns", and most interestingly, a recipe for Chocolate Pudding that INCLUDES Bisquick. Say what?! That might be too interesting to not make. I have clogging practice tomorrow morning, and they always love it when people bring food. I might bring some Bisquick Chocolate Pudding. lol - am I the only one that kind of goes "Ewww..." when I read that?!

I also got Minnie Pearl's Nashville Country Cookbook, which I only flipped through real fast, but I'm sure promises to be really entertaining. :)

I also checked out the "Feasting On Asphalt: The River Run" by Alton Brown. Anyone remember the famous cherry pickles? The recipe is TOTALLY in the book. Kid you not. Cherry pickles. In the book. Oh yeah, baby!

I also got a book called "Cooking For Women In A Hurry" put out by the Culinary Arts Institute, or some such. That just looked so bizarre. I couldn't say no to it.

High five for cherry pickles and Bisquick Chocolate Pudding! I'm totally making them both. I just decided. :)

Cookbook Find Of The Week...

I love to go perusing my library for cookbooks - I run up to Staples and copy off all the recipes I want to find, in the case of one, I find myself chasing all over creation for specific ingredients from the book, and I even convinced the library to just outright give me one, because it was missing pages.

One was just too interesting to pass by. "You Won't Believe It's Gluten-Free!" by Roben Ryberg.

I think if you've got someone in your life living gluten free, they need this book. This book is cool.

There are recipes for everything a gluten free eater misses, and can't afford to buy the overpriced gluten free versions of - pie crusts, ice cream cones, fried chicken, baguettes, pancakes, onion rings, chocolate chip cookies, and more.

I also love that as she goes through the book, she gives different tips for Gluten Free eating, including one that I found especialaly interesting. From page 207 "Most charcoal in the United States is held together with a wheat-based binder. If you're not working with a gas grill, wood-based charcoal, or real wood, cook your serving in tightly sealed foil to avoid cross contamination", and another tip that when dining out for Chinese food, to bring your own soy sauce, and request that your dish is prepared using freshly washed equipment.

My only beef with this book, if I had to have one, is that some of the ingredients are going to be kind of hard to find. Most all the baking recipes require xantham gum, and unless you have a specialty shop in close proximity, that's going to be darn hard to come by. In the case of my mother in law in particular, it's going to take about an hour to get to some Xantham Gum. Boo for that! She also calls for things like rice flour, sorghum flour, and millet flour, which, again - if you don't have a specialty market near you, is going to be hard to come to find. So, like I said - if I had to find a beef with this book, it's that some of these ingredients might be real hard to come by, depending on where you live in the country.

Coming tomorrow, a trip to a rad grocery store, and I finally found an ingredient I've been looking for forEVER. And maybe we're baking up cookies all toddler style. We'll see. :)