Posted by mac on Mar 4, 2009 in
Wednesday Bites This week, Wednesday Bites, our weekly foodie post, will be brought to you by me, Mac. Shana will most likely usually have this honor, but last night I made some excellent baklava and I thought it’d be a good thing to share the recipe with everyone.
Baklava! Yum yum yum...
I first made baklava in 2001 and made it several times during my time in college, but this was the first attempt I’ve made in recent years. I didn’t have the recipe I’d used before, so I compiled the recipe below from four different variations I found online and suited to my tastes and used what I could remember of previously having made the dish. If you try it out, you’ll have to let me know how it goes for you. Without further ado, here’s the recipe:
Baklava!!
INGREDIENTS
- 1 (16 ounce) package phyllo dough (if more than one size box available, get the longer box)
- 1 pound chopped walnuts (optionally, roast before using)
- 1 cup butter
- 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
- 1 ¼ cup water
- 1 ¼ cup white sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- ¼ teaspoon lemon rind
- 1 cup honey
DIRECTIONS
- To make the sauce, boil sugar and water until sugar is melted. Add vanilla, lemon rind and honey. Simmer for about 20 minutes. Leave uncovered and allow to cool as much as possible while you continue with other preparations and baking.
- Preheat oven to 325° F. Depending on your oven, you may want to go as high as 350°—it’s simply a matter of experimentation. Butter the bottoms and sides of a 9×13 inch pan OR you can skip buttering the pan if you simply apply extra butter to the bottom most layers when you start layering the dough.
- Chop nuts and toss with cinnamon. Set aside. Unroll phyllo dough. Cover phyllo with a dampened cloth to keep from drying out as you work. Place two sheets of dough in pan letting the excess half of the sheets drape over the side. Using a clean basting brush, butter the half of the sheet that is in the pan. It is only necessary to lightly brush on the butter, not saturate. The more wrinkles the sheet has in it, the better. Quickly fold the excess back over the buttered half and butter it as well. Repeat until you have 8 layers (4 full sheets, folded onto themselves). As you lay the sheets of dough, note that more wrinkles will equal a crispier baklava. At this point, sprinkle 2 – 3 tablespoons of nut mixture on top. Continuing as before, layering dough, butter and nuts in that order but only use 2 layers of dough (1 folded sheet) instead of the initial 8 until you reach the top. The top layer should be about 6 – 8 layers deep. Apply a small amount of extra butter to top layer, but still avoid completely saturating the dough.
- Using a sharp knife cut into four long diagonal rows, creating diamond shapes. Only cut to within a half to a quarter inch of the bottom of the pan—not all the way through. This will allow for the maximum sauce retention within the layers of the baklava. You will cut the remaining half inch or so later, after it has FULLY cooled. Bake for about 1 hour until baklava is golden and crisp. Oven times can vary quite a bit—best to go by how it looks more than any other factor.
- Remove baklava from oven and immediately spoon sauce over it. Let cool. I like to sprinkle the tiniest amount of extra cinnamon on top at this point (see photo), but I don’t think that that’s very traditional. After it’s completely cooled you can slice the rest of the way through all of the cuts you made before baking it and remove each piece carefully. Often, it’s served in cupcake papers to help contain any excess syrup but I’ve never done it that way. Leave it uncovered if possible as it gets soggy when wrapped up.
Tags: food, photos
Posted by shana on Feb 26, 2009 in
Chicago Thursday I guess the idea behind Chicago Thursdays was just to make sure this blog stayed located, as we are, in Chicago. We can talk about ourselves and we can talk about our cats, and we can post pictures of the above, and we can do that from anywhere. But we don’t live just anywhere, we live in Chicago, the Windy City, the Second City, the City by the Lake, the City on the Make (?), the Paris on the Prairie (???), the Heart of America, the City of Broad Shoulders, The Big Onion. It’s got a lot of character, and we like character. So we want Chicago to be as much a feature of our blog as anything.
That said, I’ve got to get to work. Wow, this really has been a week of intros and teasers, hasn’t it? So it is. I’m closing tonight with one of my favorite work buddies, Lou. For a couple weeks now, we’ve been saying we should go out for a quick drink after closing together sometime, since she’s a super busy student and I’m working two jobs and neither one of us would probably ever have “free time” independent from work. Our cafe is right downtown, right off of Michigan Ave, the “Magnificent Mile,” and I thought for sure there’d be lots of places for us to go at 11:30 on a week night… but interestingly enough, no dice. Everything closes by 11 on weeknights. If New York is The City That Never Sleeps, then Chicago is The City That Tries To Get To Bed At A Reasonable Hour. Catchy, isn’t it? Our one hope is the Reagle Beagle, just a couple of blocks away and open til midnight. If we have a fast close, we can totally make it.
Tags: Chicago, photos
Posted by mac on Feb 23, 2009 in
photo shoot Despite my post from this morning, I now find myself compelled to post more cat photos. I took this one, of Rohn, about half an hour ago:
Cat on a Shelf
And I took this one, of Amarok, a couple days ago:
Cat on a Chair
That’s all for now. 
Tags: cats, photos
Posted by shana on Feb 19, 2009 in
our family,
photo shoot
(he’s practically asking for it)
We now promise to post something that’s not just pictures of our cats.
Tags: cats, photos
Posted by shana on Feb 18, 2009 in
photo shoot 
It’s really not fair to post glamor shots of Rohn and then post… this… of Ammy. But I just couldn’t resist. In my defense, he did freely put himself in this position, and he did remain in this position while I went looking for my camera, and he did look directly at me and hold still for the duration of the shot…
We’ve been laughing at our cats a lot lately. Rohn, for his part, has been known scoop food out of his food dish onto his paw and eat it like that, which is hilarious. And he’s become obsessed with the filter/drain in the shower, so much that he pulls it out and runs around the house with it and chews on it, which is good for neither the drain nor his little teeth. Mac and I had to start taking it out except for when we’re showering, which has led Rohn to actually jump in the shower while it’s on a couple times. And yesterday Rohn picked a whole bag of chocolate covered pretzels up off the coffee table in the living room and ran down the hall, through the kitchen to the pantry and put it in his food bowl (a not too subtle hint?).
You know, I do think this picture of Amarok exemplifies just how chill he’s gotten since we moved to Chicago, and just how extra super chill he seems now compared to Rohn, who’s just a little crazy. At least Amarok is teaching Rohn how to jump… though Rohn is teaching Amarok how to get us out of bed in the morning by clawing at the walls…
If we wanted boring cats, we sure missed the mark. But if we wanted cats with huge egos and way too much personality, we hit the mark right on the head.
Tags: cats, photos
Posted by mac on Feb 5, 2009 in
photo shoot
Tags: cats, photos
Posted by shana on Feb 5, 2009 in
our family Mac has posted a photo album of Rohn’s arrival to Facebook. But you don’t have to be on Facebook to see them, you can just click here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=213543&l=36abd&id=551590472
Though the first few days were kind of rocky, all of us, Ammy included, are really starting to enjoy our new little buddy.
These are the ways in which Rohn is very much like Amarok:
- he loves feathers. loves.
- he prefers napping on the white swirly chair to napping on the couch
- he likes to take walks across my computer keyboard
- he wants you to pay attention to him all the time
- he is very smart and very clean
- he is very aware of how cool he is
And these are the ways in which he’s very different from Ammy:
- he likes people food, more than just kalamata olives and whiskey, and particularly enjoys licking the bottom of the bowl after I’m done with my cereal in the morning
- he has a habit of picking up objects in his mouth and running off with them, like, for example, ticket to ride trains, or Mac’s camera
- he likes to help us get out of bed in the morning by walking around our respective night stands and knocking things (like glasses of water) to the floor
- he knows how to answer the phone (though he has not yet learned to politely respond when I say, “is this Rohn??”)**
- his vertical jump is only at about one foot. We’ll work on that.
Enjoy the pictures. More to come.
** true story. I’d seen him chewing on Mac’s phone the day before, so when the phone was answered when I called but no one said anything, I had my suspicions… I called the home phone and got Mac and sure enough, he found Rohny sitting on the floor next to an open, drooly cell phone…
Tags: cats, photos, ticket to ride
Posted by shana on Jan 27, 2009 in
weather alert The piles of frozen, weeks-old snow chunks on the sidewalk are covered in crusty yellow shooter holes from the little booty-footed doggies of the neighborhood. We need more snow. Or… or maybe we need it to be April. Yeah…
I was at the grocery store yesterday and they had potted flowers: daffodils, crocuses, even tulips. I bought some daffodils in a little yellow pot. It felt great. I’m looking ahead. But tonight I went out without a hat. It did not feel so great. Oh well.
Here are some more winter pictures for you: icicle art in the courtyard and some lake-side shots from the bike path along the lake (I braved the wind on that one “warm” day last week and took the lake path home). The sand mixed with the freezing waves and made frozen upside-down drip castles on the shore. Pretty cool.
Tags: photos, weather
Posted by shana on Jan 23, 2009 in
outings We FINALLY crept above freezing yesterday, for the first time in weeks, weeks during which some days did not even get as warm as zero. To celebrate, Mac and I headed out to the lake for a sunset stroll.
Though the picture may not seem to project the tropical image you’d hope for on a typical sunset walk on the beach, you could’ve fooled us. After wind chills of -40, and after having to enforce the “no biking when it’s below zero” rule multiple days in a row, 34 felt downright balmy. Break out the swim suits and the pina coladas, hey? You don’t even need a deck chair, you can just prop yourself up in the snow…
Here are some more pictures from our evening:
Of course, it’s all a big tease. Today we woke up to 33 degrees (at 5:30 am, no less – I didn’t even wear my heated pants in to work!) but it’s been dropping all day. Tomorrow’s forecasted high is back down in the single digits, which remain fair game for the next two months, no grumbling allowed because you knew that would happen when you moved to Chicago… Better get those heated pants charged up again… deep in the throes of winter, that’s where we are.
It’s not hard to complain. In fact, it’s hard not to complain. The cold makes you feel miserable and trapped in your home and, well, cold. But if we’re being totally honest with ourselves, especially on an evening like this one, I think we’d have to admit that deep, deep down inside, we kind of love winter anyway.
Tags: photos, weather
