Amazing Desserts/Restaurant Review

A couple nights ago we went to dinner to celebrate younger brothers-in-law's birthdays (does that make sense?) at this restaurant, Zaytinya, and the food was pretty spectacular, especially that squash and cheese dish that I don't know the name of. But I especially want to show-and-tell about our desserts, I hope you don't mind fuzzy pictures of half-eaten food.

This is what I got, I don't remember what they called it because it was the special that day, but our server described it as "deconstructed baklava." It had olive oil jelly, a honey/syrup jelly, vanilla ice cream, phyllo dough with nuts rolled up in it, chopped pistachios, and fresh blackberries. It was very good and the guy pointed out that when you eat these "deconstructed" desserts you should get a little bit of all of the different elements on your spoon and eat them all at once to get the flavor of the original/classic dessert. It is pretty fun to try the different element on their own too. Olive oil jelly is surprisingly good.

This was what Lovemuffin ordered, and I think I liked it slightly better than my own. It is a Greek honey and yogurt concoction with apricot jammy stuff in the bottom and ice cream and pistachios on top. It was very pretty and very tasty.

This is what one little brother ordered, and everyone thought it was the weakest of the bunch, I was too busy taking pictures so I didn't get around to tasting it. It was another "deconstructed" dessert based on Turkish delight. I didn't really understand how to break Turkish delight down into several elements, and it was also not the most photogenic dessert. I wish I could say more about it, but since I didn't try it and no one else had a lot to say about it . . . Yeah.

The other little brother ordered this which was hands-down everyone's favorite. It was a chocolate cake with gooey insides, with cardamom and coffee flavors served with chocolate mousse-y stuff and flavored whipped cream and it was stunning, miraculous, amazing and magnificent. Our server called it "outrageous." He recommended getting the large size because the small size is just enough to piss you off.  The combination of chocolate and cardamom was incredible and revived my obsession with cardamom. In fact, I'm going to create a "cardamom" label so that you can easily find anything on this blog that contains cardamom. Perhaps I should also make cardamom chocolate cookies or muffins or something. The coffee flavor was not that noticeable to me, but it probably served to deepen the flavor of the chocolate. The thing I really liked about this dessert was that you can taste it before you even put it in your mouth.

Over all, it was a pretty great restaurant, it had a nice atmosphere but wasn't snobby or intimidating, our server was super helpful and nice, and all of the food was beyond excellent. I'm thinking of going back with my older brother for some lunch and dessert.

A New Toy

Last week Motherdear sent me an awesome food dehydrator (Thank you thank you thank you!!!) so this weekend we made all sorts of things. We dried some fruit, made yogurt, and made a fruit and yogurt leather that was pretty good, but sort of weird. Lovemuffin says he is going to try to make jerky this week, and I would like to make yogurt covered granola as a snack.

Dried pineapple was the best, although strawberries were a close second, and blueberries were the other close second. We discovered that blueberries will dry just fine from frozen, which is great because we have discovered a really cheap source of frozen blueberries.

We are going to be making a lot of yogurt because we can make twice as much as the tub we usually buy for half the price, and it tastes so good! So fresh! And we use a lot of yogurt in our house, so it definitely won't go to waste. I was going to share with you a recipe for muffins that uses yogurt, but I tried it this morning and I apparently can't get it to rise correctly, so maybe later. In the meantime, here are some pictures to make you jealous.

the beautiful Excalibur food dehydrator

Lovemuffin preparing the fruit/yogurt leather snack

delicious yogurt ready to be made into a delicious smoothie

Some of the dried fruits and snacks, we already ate a lot :)

Fruity Yogurt: or some ideas for using the sweetened condensed milk you opened by mistake

A few days ago I needed some milk for a recipe, and didn't have any regular milk, so I went to my trusty pantry and opened a can of what I though was evaporated milk, so that I could dilute it to make it regular milk, but as soon as I opened it, I realized my mistake, it was sweetened condensed milk. So I dumped it into a jar and put it in the fridge and found a can of evaporated milk and went on to do my thing.
I had to think for a few days to figure out what to do, it would be such a shame to waste sweetened condensed milk, something I hardly ever buy. I though of making dulce de leche, but I'm afraid of explosions, and I don't know exactly what to do with dulce de leche. I remembered this thing we had from an asian bakery/cafe that was sort of like a slurpee, but it had chunks of mango with shaved ice and sweetened condensed milk drizzled over it, it was very yummy, but there were not any mangoes at the grocery store. And then this recipe that looks like Almond Joy candy bars caught my eye as well as this other candy, called brigadeiros, from Brazil, but both of them seem way to sweet for me to handle right now. I will probably still make the almond joy things sometime, but do them the same as I did my macaroons, with unsweetened coconut. And then I saw this recipe for vietnamese yogurt, and it is the solution to (almost) all of my problems. Lovemuffun and Pricklypear both eat a lot of yogurt, and I am always fighting with the Lovemuffin because he eats his with a ton of jam, the jam that I made all by myself, and then there is never enough jam or yogurt for me, which frusterates me. So, here's what I did:

Fruity Yogurt
1 Large tub of plain yogurt with no added weirdness (no gelatin or corn starch for thickening)
1 Bag of frozen fruit of your choice
Some sweetened condensed milk, to taste (I used about 1/4 of the can)

Drain the yogurt over a sieve lined with cloth or just a paper towel. Let it drain for several hours till the yogurt is nice and thick, like greek style yogurt. It is nice to have it thick because the fruit will add more fluid and this is an easy way to keep it from turning into drinking yogurt. Unless you want drinking yogurt, that is okay with me, this is a very flexible recipe. Thaw the frozen fruit while the yogurt is draining, then blend the fruit up a little, so that it is chunky, not too fluid. Add the fruit to the drained yogurt, and add sweetened condensed milk to taste. You could, of course, just sweeten your yogurt with sugar, but where is the fun in that? Also, I think that would make it runnier, because of the way sugar pulls the juice out of fruit.
This large batch will last us about 3 days and I like it so much more than the pre-fruited and sweetened yogurt at the store. You can make it the level of sweetness you desire, and you can be sure that there is real fruit in there, not just artificial colors and flavors. So far I have used blackberries and a fruit medly containing strawberries, blueberries and blackberries, and I still have plenty of sweetened condensed milk. Up next is peaches.

Something Like Guacamole

This is a fun dip that I made on Christmas Eve. It's good with crackers or chips or on a sandwich of some sort. I'm sorry my pictures aren't very good, I haven't had very good light for photographing lately.

Take 1 avocado, scoop out the innards into a small bowl, mash roughly-the dip doesn't have to be perfectly smooth. Add some plain yogurt. Use fat-free yogurt if desired. Mince one clove of garlic in as well. Stir well. Add salt to taste. Mmmmmmm.....

This stuff doesn't store very well because avocado turns brown after a while. So if you want to have this at a party or something, make it right before you are going to be eating it.

Yogurt Gelato

The Lovemuffin took the Pricklypear to Italy this weekend, and it was all so beautiful! We saw some real mountains again (I've missed the mountains) and some extraordiary churches, and of course, we ate some incredible food. I've always known that the most important thing to try in Italy isn't the pizza, it's the ice cream. I'd always heard that Italian gelato is the most amazing ice cream in the world, and so far my experience backs that up. We got gelato at a small dairy near lake Como (that's it, and me, in the picture), made fresh with fresh, whole mountain milk, and it was so, so good! I got chocolate and strawberry, and they were both very good, but Lovemuffin got yogurt (which he let me sample), and man, that was perhaps the best ice cream I have ever tasted! This wasn't like that frozen yogurt garbage that people sometimes eat because it's supposed to be low-fat and healthy, this was definitely full-fat ice-cream with all the tangy flavor of plain yogurt. I tell you what, I am going to try to recreate that taste, and if I am successful, you will know. I'm sure I won't be able to recreate the texture, because I don't have an ice cream maker, either here or back with my stuff in the states. I will just have to be creative. I have found a couple of recipes that seem to have the right idea, including this one, so I'll give it a whirl. I bet it would work well with liquid nitrogen, but since I don't have any of that either...

Oh, and something funny, the people we stayed with have a dog, a boxer, and I guess she loves yogurt, and so they would get the yogurt ice cream in a cup, and let the dog lick out the melty remains.