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snacks & adventure

Category Archives: Snacks

I tried….and maybe it tasted good.

Bumper Bars at Home (+ breakfast miscellany)

27 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by frannyritchie in Snacks

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

breakfast crumble, bumper bars, granola bars, muffins, oatmeal

Ian and I went to New Zealand for two weeks in February, and one of the most delicious discoveries was Bumper Bars, a quasi-granola bar/candy bar thing that we pretended was healthy because we were On Holiday.

The apricot-chocolate one was the best, and I’ve been wanting to recreate it since.  So I scoured the internet, found a Real Simple recipe, and made some improvements – i.e. added more chocolate and more apricots.

I made them with the idea that I would take them to work for breakfast, but Ian and I scarfed a third of the pan before they were even cool.  We’re calmed down, sliced them up and put the rest away, but its clear that my vision of a healthy granola breakfast bar hasn’t panned out – they are a victim of their own success.

I’ve been using Smitten Kitchen’s breakfast crumble recipe for a few months now – so much so that the guy at the Turkish International Supermerkert has commented on my plum consumption (he also asked me if I’d been swimming yesterday.  I hadn’t, I was just that sweaty after zumba class). I keep upping the size of the recipe and we keep eating it, and its a really easy way to prepare a week’s worth of breakfasts in one go.

Finally, I got into cacao nibs a few months ago, when I made cacao-banana-coffee muffins, which are delicious.  But the enduring success from the cacao experiment was refrigerator oatmeal, which I have been making several times a week since November – you soak oats overnight with milk, sugar, cacao and fruit.  Since I am less of a dirty hippie than I used to be, I use milk and processed sugar.  I eat it on the train while glaring at people doing their make-up (I mean seriously. I wish women would stop wearing makeup in general, but barring that, I wish they would stop putting it on while sitting next to me on the train).  I’m really sensitive to the smell of it, which makes me sneeze, and watching a woman with an eyelash curler in a public place just grosses me out).

Breakfast!

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Mill Road Winter Fair, y’all

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Snacks

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belly dancers, food, Mill Road, Mill Road Winter Fair, sausages

mill rd fair

Last weekend was the Mill Road Winter Fair, one of my neighbourhood’s social highlights.  It was already packed as I headed to my mid-morning zumba class (like I was going to miss out on Gangnam style! Honey, please); it was busier on my way home; and by the time Ian and I made it to the food fair, the whole street was bumping, despite the fact that it was the first day of a pretty serious cold snap.

Ian and I saw belly dancers, a Chinese dragon, and a ten-year-old playing a surprisingly good version of “Wild Thing.”  We sampled some mulled cider; bought some potato bread and rice pudding; and crammed our face full of pizza and sausages.

The sausages from the butcher on the corner were a highlight last year, so I was pretty psyched to see them again.

Literally everyone, up and down Mill Road and on many of the street branching off, was out in force.  It was a lovely afternoon.

Weekend Highlight: Okinomi-yaki

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Snacks

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Abeno, Barbican, Big Day Out, London, Okinomi-yaki

Last weekend, after zumba (like I was going to miss gangnam style!), Ian and I headed into London to meet our friends Felix and Klara, who have been featured here before. Our initial plan had been to go to the Rain Room at the Barbican Gallery (which has also been featured on My Other Blog).

The idea of the rain room is amazing:

But the queue was not – two hours long, which is apparently pretty typical, because there are all sorts of warnings on the website (which I just visited, but did not look at before we got there).  So instead of hanging out at the Barbican with the hipsters for two hours, we went to dinner, which was the other raison d’etre of day.  We went to a place near the British Museum called Abeno, which serves obinomi-yaki, a Japanese omelette/pancake sort of thing.  We got four different kinds, including pork and kimchi; pork, squid and shrimp; a daily special with too many ingredients to recall, and one other.  We also got gyoza and a cucumber salad as appetizers and an apple-cinnamon-maple okinomi-yaki for dessert.

Holy crap, it was amazing.

It was a little weird to have your food make in front of you, because you feel weird carrying on your conversation with someone’s elbows between you (not to mention feeling rude to your server). Of course, it was also part of the appeal. Our waitress, Yoshe, was a Japanese girl with a clearly American accent.  Because I am my mother’s daughter, I asked where she was from, and she said Japan – but that her family had lived in Salt Lake City for 6 years.  When I asked what brought them there, she said they’d been Mormon (“yeah,” she shrugged, “it was kind of a part-time thing.” Naturally).

Also note: I have raccoon eyes in this photo because I went dancing on Friday and put goo-gobs of mascara on, and it somehow persisted the entire weekend.  This is serious stuff.

Eating my way across Amsterdam

26 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Snacks

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Amsterdam, food, My Friend Karin, photography, Spekuloos, The Netherlands, travel

Things I ate in Amsterdam:

– waffles
– one herring sandwich (one was more than enough)
– mini pancakes
– Vietnamese pho
– fries
– almost a full jar of Spekuloos spread
– Spekuloos ice cream
– chocolate shavings (you put it on your breakfast. its a thing.)
– cheese, every chance I got
– lots of beer and lattes

 

Drinking My Way Across Amsterdam?

24 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Snacks

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Amsterdam, Beer, brown cafes, Holland, The Netherlands, urban planning

That doesn’t sound like me.  You must be thinking of someone else.

Just kidding! It was totally me.

We were staying in Da Costabuurt, adjacent to the city centre and north of the Vondelpark.  So most of the bars we went to were local.

 

So Snacky All the Time: Urban Homesteading round #2

16 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Snacks

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baking, cooking, courgette, seasonal vegetables, zucchini

Urban homesteading is a grand adventure.  I’ve fended off dogs and small children in the Mill Road Cemetery; climbed trees in Grantchester (Felix, just try and stop me!); and snagged free vegetables in a variety of other places, as well. I’ve written about my plum pie and my elderberry syrup, but I want to document my other successes as well.

The most exciting vegetable I stumbled upon this autumn (so far!) was a pair of zucchini/courgettes that a coworker brought in to the office.  I found a recipe on Becky Bakes.  As is an unfortunate trend with cooking blogs, her writing is super annoying but her recipes are super delicious (the outlier is Smitten Kitchen.  I’m not a regular reader, but when I do read her posts, they are almost always typo-free and minimally obnoxious, which is more than I can say about this blog).

Anyway.  Literary style aside, the zucchini snacking cake was the most delicious thing I’ve made since salted nutella tarts.  The regular zucchini bread was equally delicious (and quickbreads are impossible to screw up.  Banana, pumpkin, zucchini, applesauce…easy peasy). I don’t remember what recipe I chose or I’d share it with you – but I can share some tips for making your zucchini bread healthy (honestly!healthy!….ish).  Go scant on the sugar (this is something I’m going to push the boundaries of. I also want to experiment with coconut sugar and/or honey, which have lower glycemic indexes and are therefore better for you and less likely to give you diabetes).  You can swap out all of the oil for applesauce or even chunks of apple microwaved into submission.  Finally, go a little heavy on the zucchini – you can get 2 loaded cups in there and it just tastes more moist and not like you’ve added healthy stuff.

You’re welcome!

Ian’s Birthday and Liz’s Visit

08 Monday Oct 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Snacks

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birthdays, England, pub crawl, pubs, The Eagle, travel, vacation

Ian had an birthday a few weeks ago.  In the interest of making his big day A Big Day, I hounded him for months about how he wanted to celebrate, without ever getting a straight answer or actually making any plans.  And then a friend of ours from college came (relatively) last minute, and Ian came up with the perfect fete: we did a cross-Cambridge pub crawl on Friday and a fair on Parker’s Piece on Saturday, with a trip to Grantchester and Audley End thrown in for good measure (about which more later).

Anyone wishing to imitate our awesome pub crawl is welcome to our itinerary:

– Fort St. George for Pimm’s
– The Old Spring for drinks & dinner
– Champion of the Thames for scampi fries and after-dinner drinks
– The Eagle, because its famous (its the place where the discovery of DNA was announced AND the place where RAF troops hung out during WWII – there’s still their graffiti all over the back room
– detour through the city centre, to laugh at all the scantily-clad townies waiting in line for the awful bars
– the Free Press
– The Tram Depot, because its open late

We didn’t go to the Kingston Arms or the Cambridge Blue because we were drunk and tired, but those would have been next on the agenda:

The next day, we went zorbing – which has been on my to-do list for a little while.  It’s basically exactly what it looks like: you get in giant plastic balls and run/jump around for a few minutes.  It’s like having a movable bouncy castle.  Its awesome.  As expected, though, it gets pretty clammy in there pretty quickly.
 

Urban Homesteading

22 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Snacks

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Cambridge, England, food, harvest, summer, vacations

I spent a year living in rural Pennsylvania, and while I was there I had a huge garden and a small orchard. I froze fruit, made applesauce, harvested garlic, learned to make pesto from different greens to deal with the chard that ran wild in my garden, picked berries, foraged for chives in the spring…I was just learning, so I didn’t do anything stupid like pick mushrooms, but one of my favorite parts of living in the country was how much the land gave you if you looked.  Even an idiot like me could materially reduce their grocery bill just by paying attention.

Then I moved to Boston, where opportunities for gleaning were much thinner on the ground, and I was too busy to take advantage anyway.  Apart from a memorable trip to pick blackberries, my time in the big city flew by in a blur of grad school and Trader Joe’s frozen meals.

Last autumn, I was too overwhelmed by the move to think about apple picking.  But even though my attempts at gardening only yielded about five strawberries, it turns out Original Cambridge is full of free fruit, and apples are just the beginning (or, seasonally speaking, somewhere toward the end).  Earlier this month, I wrote about plum picking at the Orchard Tea Rooms. Things have picked up speed since then, and here is a brief list:

– applesauce with apples purloined from Grantchester, used in a variety of baked goods and distributed to friends and coworkers
– a second round of apples for applesauce, apple butter, apple helppies, apple juice, and any other apple product you can recommend because
– plum freezer jam, again with purloined plums
– elderberry syrup from elderberries in the Mill Road Cemetery
– elderberry muffins
– frozen elderberries
– blackberries frozen for baked goods later in the year

Last weekend I got completely carried away with the elderberries.  I strolled through the Mill Road Cemetery until I literally couldn’t carry any more, encountering two adorable small children near the Cambridge Blue, both of whom wanted to help me pick fruit.  Because I wasn’t eager to be the creepy adult peddling fruit to six year olds, I said no thank you and told them it would stain their fingers – which they took as a challenge.  One of the little girls, with pale skin, frekcles, purple leggings, a purple skirt, and pink crocs, held a single elderberry between four fingers and sang “look! I didn’t stain my fingers! I’m going to eat this one!”

I must have managed to strike the appropriate air of adult authority, because I gave her my best Disapproving Look and said “I would really prefer if you asked your mum first.” And she said “aw man!” but let the berry fall, and I moved on.  At this point I was lugging around a giant pot literally overflowing with berries, so I slogged home and started de-stemming them.  Five hours and no breaks later, I had about three pints of elderberry syrup, a purple-stained countertop, and four or five cups of elderberries for muffins (check!), freezing (check!) and leaving in the fridge too long and letting them get mouldy, thereby wasting all my hard work (check!).  I’m including two pictures, including one blurry one with my face in it – for context.  We are talking serious elderberry action. The pot was so big that I had trouble getting everything into the photo.

It was epic.

Plum Pie!

05 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Snacks

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

cream tea, Grantchester Meadows, My Friend Jaime, pie

My friend Jaime came to visit a couple weeks ago, on the heels of our trip to Wales.  We took a trip to Southwold, strolled through Cambridge, ate a lot of delicious food, and filled each other in on the last ten months of our life. Jaime’s been living in Israel and has been caught up in a whirlwind cross-cultural romance, which I was SO EXCITED to hear about.

Because we painted this country red, I have a few posts to share with you.  But I thought I’d start with the quintessentially Cantabriggian thing that we did: we walked through the Meadows to Grantchester.  Walking to Grantchester is a Thing: you walk through the Meadows along the Cam to the Orchard Tea Room, where you can get cream tea (tea, clotted cream, jam, scones) and sit in green cloth deck chairs in a leafy setting.

Because I am an idiot, I didn’t realise the first couple times I was there that the leafy setting where you take your cream tea is an ORCHARD – thus, Orchard Tea Rooms.  I realised this as Jaime and I were sitting under a tree and I realised that there were tiny little fruits hanging off – yellow things the size of large cherries.  Closer inspection: it was a plum.  Jaime and I ate a few before running all over the place gathering plums.  On our way our, we saw plums, pears, and apples – a whole cornucopia of fruit – but Jaime and I brought a crap-ton of plums back to the house, half of which we turned into a pie.  A very, very tart pie, but a delicious pie nonetheless.

(for those more interested in the snack than the adventure: we used pre-made pie crust; we filled it up with cut-up plums and added cinnamon and sugar and a little bit of nutmeg; and then we stuck it in the oven at 350F/180C and took it out when it looked done)

Summer 2012?

20 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by frannyritchie in Snacks

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

London, summer, the Peak District, UK, Wales

How have I fallen off the wagon again? After my friend Georgiana told me she checks Snacks & Adventures religiously, I promised myself I’d step up the posting and recommit to my quest to become internet-famous (it still might happen!) (Hi, Georgiana!).  Summer 2012 is drawing to a close, but in 2011 England had a terrible summer followed by an incredible autumn.  Since we’ve already had a terrible summer, here’s hoping for a repeat performance!  Its a little early for a retrospective, but now is as good a time as any to reflect on the last two and a half months…

Anyway. There have been many things that haven’t warranted a blog post but have been pretty great: a lazy day in London with my friend Robert; a stroll across the lawn at King’s on my birthday (those are my feet on the grass!), many breakfasts of challah and fruit (I particularly love challah for two reasons: 1. its delicious and 2. the cute bread vendor at the market always smiles at me and makes small talk when I buy it). Its been too cold to have leisurely drinks in pub gardens very often, but I have still managed to make the rounds and do some indoor drinking.

The Mr. Kipling biscuits in the photo are so weird even English people laugh at them (I mean, someone must buy them, but no one I know).  But I had my first tea cake yesterday, and those are no laughing matter.

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