Click, Click, Click, Click Camera: Holga Photography

For my last birthday, my super thoughtful brother just happened to get me something I had been eying on Amazon for a while: a Holga starter kit (pictured above). Holgas are toy cameras that became popular in the '80s for their inexpensive price tag and beloved for the charming idiosyncrasies of their cheap plastic construction. I've been playing around with my Holga and finally got around to buying a scanner to digitize my images. I'm an amateur hobbyist photographer at best, but I thought I'd share my prints for anyone who might be interested and for my own self fascination.

Visit my web album of Holga photography here.

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What's Cookin' - One Bowl Mascarpone Brownies from The Kitchn

If you enjoy cooking, you should add The Kitchn to your reading list immediately. The Kitchn is by far my favorite blog, cooking or otherwise. They have fantastic tips, recipes and just plain interesting posts. If you're not a regular reader of The Kitchn, then you may have missed this truly wonderful and wonderfully easy brownie recipe. Try it. Right. Now. I'm not kidding, it's that good.

(Picture originally uploaded by Sarahrae Trover over at The Kitchn)

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Falafel Fail

I'm beginning to wonder if maybe I'm missing some falafel gene. Surely, at the very least I'm missing the requisite cultural competence. Those are my falafel's in the picture, but don't let their appearance deceive you -- they look better than they taste. As you can see, I tried to hide my falafel ineptitude with spring greens, tomato and cucumber, but I think that only made things worse. Another failed falafel attempt.

The false promise of tasty falafel.

In addition to what I'm convinced is genetic inadequacy, I think the problem with these falafels is two fold. First, the recipe just wasn't that great -- which is what I get for using some random, not user rated recipe floating around on the Internet. Hopefully that lesson has now been learned. The spice proportions were alright, and these things were drab, close to tasteless. Falafel attempt #1 may have not looked quite right, but they tasted delicious. These were the opposite, they looked better but tasted far worse. Furthemore , falafel professionals undoubtedly know this, but you just cannot bake falafel and have it still be a falafel. Falafel's really must be fried. I tried using the broiler, which resulted in a little bit of browning, but you need to fry them to get the right texture. In a last ditch effort to salvage my dinner, I stuck them in a pan with some vegetable oil. They didn't fall apart as much as last time, but as I mentioned before, they were tasteless, which in my book is much worse.

From the looks of it, you'd expect them to be pretty good ... well, you'd be wrong.

After a few minutes of broiling on both sides, they flattened out a little -- I was just glad they hadn't fallen apart.

The second part of the problem I again attribute to the use of canned versus dried chickpeas. Unless I can find some dried chickepas, there isn't much I can do about that. If I do find the dried variety and my falafels still suck, I'll take it as evidence of the missing falafel gene. I just may have to quiet my next falafel hankering with the crumbly but delicious mess I made last time. At least the lemonade tasted great -- almost good enough to cover up how disappointingly bad these falafels turned out.

At least I know I have no inherent disability when it comes to making lemonade.

Falafel - 2, Me - 0.

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Summer Treat: Joy the Baker's Raspberry Lemonade

I've had some frozen raspberries sitting in my freezer for who knows how long, so I was thrilled when Joy the Baker posted her recipe for Summer Sweet Raspberry Lemonade. Few things say summer to me more than an ice cold glass of raspberry lemonade. Until recently, I've always been the type to "make" my lemonade from frozen concentrate. That was until I decided to make a concerted effort to cut high-fructose corn syrup from my diet and reduce my sugar intake in general, both for health reasons and environmental ones.

Last time I was at the grocery store I stocked up on some lemons (both for this recipe and also for some zest I needed for another recipe) and got around to using them today.

To be perfectly honest, you can't beat the convenience of those frozen concentrate juices. From start to the end of clean up, it took me more than an entire half-hour episode of "Marketplace" (I'm a big public radio fan and I like to have some "company" while I'm in the kitchen) -- roughly 45 minutes. Granted, I'm already a slow and deliberate cook and also I had a teeny tiny strainer. As you can imagine, if you don't have an electric juicer or one a really neat mechanized retro juicer press (which if you do, I'm so jealous of you), this recipe requires a bit of elbow grease. I have neither of these contraptions, just a beautiful glass juicer that I did not have any luck finding at stores but was able to nab from my mother's kitchen (she never uses it anyway).

Upon the Kitchn's recommendation, I halved my lemons lengthwise, which for reasons untold, yields more juice -- I was able to squeeze the full cup's worth from four lemons, one of which was admittedly a little runty. I stuck pretty closely to the measurements in the recipe, opting for 3/4 cup sugar rather than the full cup for the sake of my sugar intake. I also put in slightly more raspberry sauce because I wanted to use up all sauce I pressed through my tiny strainer.


The juice needs to chill for about 20 minutes longer, but the initial sampling was divine. There is, of course, the satisfaction of making something for yourself and knowing exactly what's in it -- no unpronouncable ingredients or HFCS here!

Final note, lemonade is a fantastic way to use up those naked lemons left over from zesting. Here are few other uses for those sad nakie lemons shivering in your fridge.

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What's Cookin' - Baked Falafel

Even though my first attempt at making falafel -- a wonderful Middle Eastern (not Greek, as I once erroneously thought) dish of fried spiced chickpeas -- two or three months ago was pretty much an unmitigated disaster in terms of presentation, the mixture of herbs and spices was so delicious that I've been craving it ever since. Unfortunately, my sesame allergy prevents me from procuring falafel at food establishments like most other people. (Much to my boyfriend's dismay, I attempted to get falafel at a restaurant once after making sure there was no sesame in the falafel itself ... but I forgot about the tahnini.) Tonight, I can resist the call of the falafel no longer and am going to give it another go.

Homemade falafels take #1, though yummy tasting, completely fell apart in the frying pan until it became a mess of brownish green slop nowhere close to even resembling the delicious falafel it aspired to be -- more fal-awful than falafel if you ask me (hardy har har). I attribute the disaster primarily to the use of canned versus dried then soaked chickpeas. I tried to remedy this deficiency for future falafel frying at my local Trader Joe's, but they only carry the canned type. (On a somewhat related note, they also don't carry arborio rice, which surprised me, TJ's being the precisely the type of place where yuppie, arborio-cooking types such as myself wouuld shop.) Not wanting to brave the alleged general unpleasantness of Berkeley Bowl (seriously, read the reviews on Yelp, it sounds like an acute version of foodie hell) or the prices at Whole Foods, I'm going to have to stick with the canned chickpeas. In order to avoid the previous sopping disaster, for homemade falafels take #2, I'm going to try baking them instead. I'll be using this recipe gleaned from the interwebs and will let you know how it goes and maybe even provide pictures. We'll see.

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