use real butter

Recipe: pepita brittle

It’s finals week! I mean, it’s the week where all of the semi-finalists from The Awaken Your Senses Challenge go head to head for $10,000 for their favorite food charity. Living in a cave? Need a recap? Twelve food bloggers described their favorite food memories and Chef Dave of Good Bite recreated those memories using Quaker instant oatmeal. Every two weeks, viewers voted for their favorite of four food bloggers’ creations to select a semi-finalist. This week, voters determine which of the three semi-finalists’ charities will win the $10,000:

1) Catherine McCord of weelicious championing Stone Barns Center For Food and Agriculture

2) Jen Yu (that’s ME!) of use real butter (this blog!) championing Farm to School

3) Laura Levy of Laura’s Best Recipes championing Food for the Poor

I’m in the finals, yo! I SO TOTALLY NEED YOUR VOTE! Only with your help can we win $10,000 for Farm to School, a wonderful organization that “…brings healthy food from local farms to school children nationwide. The program teaches students about the path from farm to fork, and instills healthy eating habits that can last a lifetime. At the same time, use of local produce in school meals and educational activities provides a new direct market for farmers in the area and mitigates environmental impacts of transporting food long distances. More than 30 million children eat a school lunch five days a week, 180 days a year. If school lunch can taste great, and support the local community, it is a win-win for everyone.”

Think about it – feeding children healthy food, helping local family farms, educating children, strengthening the community. Won’t you please do me the honor of voting for my charity? It’s as simple as four clicks!

Click #1) Go to the Quaker Talk site

Click #2) Click on “Vote” or “Watch & Vote”

Click #3) Click on Cherries Jubilee video

Click #4) Click on the GREEN THUMB to vote for my charity, Farm to School!

Hey, I hope everyone had a nice weekend! Mine was jam-packed full of friends, time-sensitive clandestine plans, work, rejoicing in cooler weather, and a few epiphanies. One of those epiphanies: this weekend was use real butter’s five year blogiversary. My plan was to have a big blowout of a giveaway, but… you’ll have to wait a little because 1) I am deciding on a good giveaway prize and 2) there’s just too much going on (for me) in November. So please be patient with me… you always are :)

Five years. You could call five years a long time, a short time, whatever. It’s enough time to see a pattern in what urb has become for me. urb has always been a personal blog with a good bit of talk about food. When I went public with it in August 2007, I had to clean it up – clean up my language, censor what I say (oh, you didn’t think I was censoring anything? ha!), move a good fraction of old posts to the other blog, put recipes up in a format that someone other than myself could follow. I spent several months finding my groove in my posting frequency – basically how often I could post without turning it into a chore. My photography evolved with the blog. It is still evolving which I take as a good sign.

The food blogging community has changed a lot in the past two years from when I went public to now. Some for the better, but I feel most of it isn’t for the better. Notice a lot of burnout lately? There’s some unspoken (well, actually it’s probably spoken all too often) mantra about HOW TO BE A FOOD BLOGGER which makes me throw up a little in my mouth every time I hear about it. One of the best ways to start a food blog is to be yourself. It’s like dating. If you present yourself as something you are not, you’re going to attract the wrong kind of partner and you’ll probably be unhappy. And if you’re just in it for the money, well – there’s a name for that too. I’m all about the love here.

I found myself swearing up a storm this weekend because I wasted four hours and a lot of ingredients trying to make a recipe that flopped. WHY? Why was I even making those? For the blog? Right. Well, no more. I don’t want that. I never wanted this blog to be a chore and it’s starting to feel like one. And once I announced that urb was not the boss of me, I felt better. Much better. urb was never solely a dedicated food blog and I don’t want it to be. It’s my creative space for sharing food, photography, my opinionated rants, and random bits of life. Anyone looking for a recipe source in a vacuum has likely left this place long ago.

So, five years – plenty of learning and a little adjustment here and there. I have met so many wonderful people and made some incredible friends through this blog. True love, I tell ya. Thanks for sticking with me. Now on to the food.

Recipe: green tea adzuki macarons

NaBloWriMo day 27.

World colliding: NaBloWriMo meets the Daring Bakers meets use real butter. Oy.

The official line: The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

The unofficial line: I went with a tried and true recipe from Helen, my macaron expert. Sorry – I didn’t have time for screwing around with an unknown this month. I had a few hours before my flight to California, but I wanted to make some macs to take to my grandma for her birthday. Helen’s recipes never let me down. Never.

Recipe: rum raisin ice cream

NaBlo-Freaking-WriMo day 21.

Okay, it’s not actually NaBlo-Freaking-WriMo, but that’s how I’m feeling about it. [Oh! Please don’t forget to vote for my charity on the Good Bite/Quaker Oats video competition – clicky clicky on the linky linky. Look for Cherries Jubilee and help Farm to School win $10,000. Thank you!] Present Me wants to go back and smack Past Me upside the head for signing on because far too many things are falling into the neglect pile. Well, it’s time for a recipe so I’ll quit with the chit chat and git-a-goin’.

I don’t care what time of year it is, it is never too cold for ice cream. Boozy ice creams are particularly welcome during the winter holiday months. Cream and booze – so festive! I make a lot of ice cream because it is my favorite way to use up all of those egg yolks. I don’t tend to indulge much though… tummy aches. I serve the ice cream to dinner guests or I’ll assign Jeremy a couple of flavors to finish so I can clear the freezer for more ice cream. But there are a few flavors that I have a little love affair with: pralines and cream, butter pecan, and rum raisin.