To juice or not to juice?

The wheatgrass shot from Puree Juice Bar, Bethesda, is the least-disgusting wheatgrass juice I've ever tasted.

After watching the documentary “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead,” Mr. X-sXe ran out and bought a juicer. This purchase was a point of contention, since he tends to get obsessed with one food craze, only to eventually abandon it for the next best thing (see Kombucha, Yonanas, yogurt-making).

A couple months later, I’m still undecided on whether the juicer was a good idea. On the upside, it’s inspired us to incorporate more fresh fruits and vegetables into our diets. There are green veggies I don’t love eating that I will happily drink. But most of the roughage is purged, so you lose an important benefit from eating fresh produce. I can’t help but think of my immigrant parents tsk-tsking at the amount of waste. (gardeners: the leftovers make a good compost.)

As for juicing as a weight-loss solution, we haven’t been use our juices as meal replacements so much as supplements. In “Fat, Sick,” the guys go on a crash diet, drinking only juice for months. I’m way too into my solids to give them up.

Our green mocktail. See recipe below.

Back to Mr. X-sXe’s adventures in juicing. In a misguided attempt to be healthy, his first recipe involved Brussels sprouts, onions, kale, carrots, and asparagus. DO NOT DO EVER MAKE THIS, UNLESS IT’S IN THE NAME OF REVENGE. This “juice” stank up the entire house, literally, but he drank it anyway. Afterwards, sulfuric fumes emanated from his pores.

Since then, our rule-of-thumb has been this: don’t juice onions or cruciferous veggies. The key to tastiness seems to be adding a sweet base to blend with other ingredients.  You can try sticking with similar color groupings. For example:

Green juice:

• Green apples
• Spinach or chard or kale
• Cucumber

Red juice:

• Beets
• Red apples
• Strawberries

Orange juice:

• Oranges
• Carrots
• Mango
• Ginger (use sparingly)

This recipe below is a modification of the green juice. It’s really tasty–surprisingly, there are no odd flavors reminding you that you’re drinking something healthy. The fennel is not overpoweringly licorice-y, while the mint leaves a clean feeling in your mouth. “Even the burps taste good,” Mr. X-sXe commented.

Green Mocktail Recipe

• 1 bulb fennel (2.50 for 2 bulbs at Trader Joe’s)
• 1 bag baby spinach
• 6 granny smith apples
• 1 package fresh mint leaves, stems removed
• 1 package fresh pineapple (at least 1 pound): cheaper if you buy an entire fresh pineapple for about $3 and let it ripen for a few days
• 1 cucumber
• 2 limes (rind and white part cut off)
• Kosher salt for the rims, if you wanna pimp it out

PS: If you can’t be bothered to buy a juicer, try Puree in downtown Bethesda. They have some really delicious concoctions. Their juices don’t come cheap, so we tend to go for the stuff we can’t make at home, like the wheatgrass shot or orange lassi (not a yogurt drink), which is so rich that it goes down like a dessert.

The DC cheesecake truck

In a few short years, DC’s gone from having only dirty-water dog trucks to no less than 40 types of roving foodmobiles. One of them, the Sweetz Cheesecake Truck, sells only its namesake. That’s pretty ballsy when you consider how polarizing cheesecake is.

These strawberry and lemon-blueberry cheesecakes survived a Metro trip and car ride home.

Chances are, you know someone who doesn’t do cheesecake because it’s too rich—or they hate cream cheese—or both.  Let’s consider the usual suspects: Cheesecake Factory is the Ben & Jerry’s of cheesecakes* as far as density, so it can take a couple sittings to finish a single piece.

Meanwhile, Junior’s is the gold standard of the classic cheesecake but again, it’s not exactly light fare. This is probably why cheesecake is dessert anathema to even the most dedicated sugar addicts.

These individual cheesecakes from the Cheesecake Truck, however, are the antithesis of the heavy cheesecake. Lots of air whipped into the cake keeps things light. Depending on which flavor your get, it’s sitting on a chocolate cookie crumb or graham-type crust. Each is about 3” in diameter—intimidating at first, until you realize how easily your fork sinks into it. Pretty soon, you’ve polished off one on your own.

Flavors vary every day/season. I tried the black forest, strawberry, and lemon-blueberry. The black forest (chocolate, cherries, chocolate-cookie base) was my favorite. It didn’t last long enough to make it into the photo.

*Ben & Jerry’s has very little air in their ice cream.

Afternoon tea, served 2 ways

That's a baby scone mounting a cupcake. "High Tea" cupcake from Red Velvet.

When I’m in Gallery Place, I feel compelled to cruise past Red Velvet Cupcakery to see what the special flavor is. They’re always coming up with incredibly creative concoctions, some of which deliver on flavor (like their Dark & Stormy, inspired by the drink) and some of which fall flat on execution (see their cheddar apple cupcake).

The current special flavor is called “High Tea.” It’s a cake with a ton of black tea baked in, orange cream-cheese frosting, and a tiny scone on top. Yes, that’s a tiny scone—not a piece of a scone, but a scone baked to be Smurf-size. While adorable to behold, the cake part tasted odd. Mr. X-sXe thought it was because they chose too smoky a black tea. I couldn’t put my finger on what I didn’t like about the cake part. All I knew is that it’s the sort of thing you consider interesting but aren’t dying to eat again.

While visiting my parents over the holidays, my mom and I went for afternoon tea at Washington Duke Inn in Durham, NC.  If I were a stay-at-home trophy wife, I’d make a point of going to afternoon tea every few months. It’s relaxing, fun, and something about the assortment of tiny goodies makes you feel like Kirsten Dunst in Marie Antoinette. In reality, I go maybe once every couple of years. Point is, it’s kind of like the Melting Pot: a meal for a special occasion. You’ve gotta go with someone you can stand to stare at for a few hours, and definitely not on a first date. After all, it takes time for your body to acclimate to all that sugar. Plus, hot water refills for your teapot are free.

Washington Duke offers a fairly traditional tea service—cucumber sandwiches, tiny pastries, fancy chocolates. The best part is the freshly baked pecan scones with lemon curd, strawberry jam, and crème fraiche. So save a little room, if possible, because those come out last.

There were only a few other tables of afternoon tea diners. Most of them looked like tourists, not the genteel southern types in oversized hats that you’d expect. It didn’t make for good people-watching, but at least there’s plenty of food to keep you preoccupied.

Remember Almond Roca?

Photo poached from jessicaclairesworld.blogspot.com

It’s a chocolate-and-almond-covered toffee that takes some serious chomping to bite into–so it kinda sounds like your teeth are breaking (but you won’t care, since it’s delicious). Back when I was growing up in the 80s, it came in these unmistakable Pepto-pink tins. They actually still make the stuff in similar packaging. My mom re-used the tins everywhere in our house when I was a kid. It was always a bummer to open a tin only to find a collection of loose buttons or rubber bands instead of gold-wrapped toffee nuggets.

This dark chocolate roasted-pistachio toffee is basically the Trader Joe’s version of Almond Roca. At $4 for 7.5 oz, part of me hoped it would suck so I wouldn’t have to buy it again. It didn’t suck. On the contrary, it’s addictive. Luckily, I’m afraid that eating this toffee regularly will result in more chipped teeth.* That, and the price, will likely deter me from keeping this stocked in the pantry.

*I already have a chipped tooth that’s been unsuccessfully “fixed” twice. The first time, biting down on a baguette took the filling out. The second, a Twizzler was the culprit. I didn’t want to stop eating baguettes or Twizzlers, so the tooth remains jagged.

Yonanas, a gadget worth the counter space

When we first got a huge box from my mother-in-law around the holidays, I approached it with trepidation. She likes buying us kitchenware. And we’re already so short on storage space that things pop out and attack us when we open our cabinets.

Turns out it was the Yonanas machine, a phallic-looking gadget that turns frozen bananas into something akin to soft serve. Yonanas isn’t a juicer, but it’s designed specifically for creating banana magic. (Shockingly, Yonanas did not sponsor this blog post, and Michelle Obama is not the national spokeswoman.)

On Pie V. Cake we’ve extolled the virtues of Annie’s Banannies before in this review. You may have come across something similar at Chicken Out, with their Going Bananas product.  Here’s the clincher: it’s just a frozen banana, but it tastes creamy like dairy.

The other cool part is the show. Watching the machine go to work is half the fun. At first, it spits out a few shards of frozen banana. That had us worried. But by the time the second banana’s in the machine, it’s at the soft-serve-texture stage.

The cool part of having your own machine is you can add other fruit into the mix. Here we tried frozen blueberries. We’ve also done pineapple. One thing to note is that you always need plenty of bananas for your base, because you don’t get the creamy texture from the other fruits. Another tip: give your bananas plenty of time to freeze. Put them in at least a day ahead. When you want to impress dinner guests, it kind of ruins things if they have to stick around a few hours waiting for flaccid bananas to harden.

Proof that Tout de Sweet’s almond croissant is the best thing ever

Photo by JDang

JDang bites into the much-hyped-by-me almond croissant from Tout de Sweet (a bakery in the older section of downtown Bethesda, near Tastee Diner). She chews. Her chewing gradually slows as her dopamine levels surge.

“This might be the best thing ever,” she declares reverently.

Me: “It IS the best thing ever. See why I feel like I should kowtow whenever I see that pastry chef? Those hands are magic.”

JDang: “I love Bethesda!”

Me: “What? That’s like saying, ‘I love Northern Virginia.’”

As JDang left DC, I snuck another one into her lunch for the bus ride.

On the phone, a week later:

Me: “So how was that day-old almond croissant?”

JDang: “Sooo good.”

Me: “Even soggy?”

JDang: “Yeah, even soggy.”

Ms. Cake: “Aren’t you glad I forced it on you?”

JDang: “Yeah, I THOUGHT I didn’t want it, because we’d binged on sugar all weekend. But I got on the bus and realized I was wrong.”

There you have it. Quod erat demonstrandum. Tout de Sweet makes the best almond croissant ever. Try it and beg to differ.

Pie > cake when it’s 100 degrees outside

I’ll begrudgingly admit that pie beats cake this time of year. For one, berries are a lot sweeter and cheaper. Cake’s too heavy when it’s a sauna outside, not to mention that icing quickly turns into a puddle. Add to that all the recent magazine spreads of pie porn (Food Network, Oprah), and it’s hard to get pie off the brain.

Mini-pies from Sweet & Natural.

We recently tried the mini-pies from Sweet & Natural in Mt. Rainier, courtesy of Surabhi and Tom. Fascinatingly, Sweet & Natural started out as a bakery (you can find their baked goods at veggie-friendly cafes and markets around DC, including Whole Foods) but now also offers vegan soul food (!)

These apple and blueberry pies had a thin crust, with conservatively sweetened fruit filling. You wouldn’t pick up on the fact that they’re vegan—these were good pies, period. Perfect for your friends who are constantly moaning that everything’s too sweet.

Meanwhile, Whole Foods is having a pie sale through the end of July—all pies are $9.99. The strawberry & rhubarb is typically $15.99, so it was too good a deal to pass up.

We haven’t had the best of luck with baked goods from Whole Foods. They sometimes phone it in when it comes to their prepared foods (soggy pizzas, rice that isn’t fully cooked, not-worth-the-calories pastries). But this was damn tasty. The first sensation that hits your tongue is the tartness–exactly what you want when it comes to something like rhubarb. The fruit chunks are generously sized and firm, which says, “I didn’t come out of a can.” And the crust, which is oatmeal crumble on top, browns up nicely in the toaster oven to add crunch. Add a dollop of Greek yogurt, and Bob’s yer uncle. Or something.

Health department to Missourians: No more cicada ice cream for you!

Next time those pesky cicadas decide to pay us above-grounders a visit, let’s make ‘em into ice cream! Great idea, except that someone tried it in Missouri and got shut down by the health department. Apparently the flavor was like butter pecan except with cicadas, not pecans. The first (only) batch sold out quickly despite looking like this:

Image of Sparky's cicada ice cream from columbiamissourian.com

Remember when people’s pets were lapping up cicada carcasses last time they hit DC, then vets were doing overtime to surgically repair the clogged plumbing? I’m still haunted by footage of Rover’s cicada-infested innards.

Normally I’m game for trying novelty desserts. Bacon cupcakes, no biggie. Chicken ice cream, sure. But cicada ice cream—nope, not trying it. You shouldn’t put anything into your mouth that’s lived underground for that long and comes in units called swarms. Plus, have you seen the bulbous devil eyes on those things?

Loveliness via http://www.batw.net/Cicada.html

 

 

Scratch, a bakery that makes you want to become a regular

Every town in American deserves a place like Scratch. It’s a small bakery with a down-home feel in Durham, NC. This part of downtown Durham was never fully commercially “revived,” despite decades of efforts. So there’s a certain peaceful eeriness to the area, where small pockets of independently owned cafes, boutiques, and shops sit in the shadow of (or inside) former tobacco warehouses.

We paid Scratch a visit on a Sunday. The area around the bakery was so quiet, a group of teens were skateboarding down the middle of the road with glorious abandon.

I like a bakery that serves savory options side-by-side with the sweets. We had the sausage biscuits, which were probably the ungreasiest I’ve had in my life (for those of you who prefer a bit of biscuit with your butter instead, head to Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen) and a side of cheddar grits that would promptly shut down any misconceptions about grits being bland.

As for the sweets, Mr. X-sXe got the chocolate sea-salt crostata. It was so rich, you could split it 3 ways and leave perfectly satisfied.  It had too much chocolate filling, if that’s even possible.

I went for the lemon chess pie, figuring that if there was only 1 slice left, it had to be good. And it was. Not overly sweet, good level of tartness, flaky crust. I’m generally not a huge pie fan,* but  I’m definitely a fan of these pies.

*Unless it’s key lime or pumpkin, which should be available year-round.

Locally sourced popsicles, popping up everwhere

Shortly after learning about the Pleasant Pops truck in DC, we stumbled on Locopops in Chapel Hill, a local chain. Its cheery storefront has taken over a former laundromat next to Great Harvest bread.

Summer always comes early to NC (like DC, spring is just a fleeting hope), so when we visited over Memorial Day it was hot as the third circle of hell. The Locopops were a great way to cool down. And guilt-free, if you opt for a no-sugar flavor like the cucumber-mint on the right.

For something sweeter, try a flavor like the Mojito (left). Like Baskin-Robbins’ daiquiri ice, it’s a refreshing cocktail-inspired flavor with no alcohol kick. (Even though I always felt like I was getting away with something when I used to order the daquiri ice in junior high.)