Who goes to Chicago for an extended weekend 1 week in a row? I do! The Saturday after I returned from Chicago with my cousin I went back for spring break with my older sister, her family, my mom, and my nephew. All together it was 3 adults and 3 children (2 boys aged 8 and 1 tween aged 13). It was a 3 day/2 night blitz of family friendly fun!

My nephew and I traveled into the city on the early morning train. In order to prevent half our budget being blown on $3 bottles of Amtrak branded water I packed a snack bag full of goodies: muffins, trail mix, apples, nutella 2 go, and red vines.



My sister and her family drove over from Indiana and we all got in around 1pm. By the time we'd checked into the hotel everyone was hongrey (as my nephew likes to pronounce it). So we headed south of the loop for good for you burgers at Epic Burger. It's a shop that uses hormone free, locally as possible sourced ingredients to make an all American meal. Think Chipotle but with burgers and shakes instead of burritos and nachos.




What I really like about Epic burger is the thin patty. Give me a thin patty (a la Crazy Jim's in A2 or Steak and Shake) any day over those huge thick ones. I love how the thin patty gets a little crusty sear that provides critical texture differences. After such an epic (wha wha) meal we had to walk it off. So we rounded up the troops and took a stroll up Michigan Ave. to Millennium Park.





Next up was Navy Pier where I redeemed myself in the eyes of my nephews due to the presence of actual rides!




Here's a quad sequence of the kids at the ferris wheel.
I refused to go on b/c I am super afraid of heights.




The next morning we woke up and slowly got ourselves together. Then we walked across the bridge and eat brunch at Yolk.



Here's my nephew chowing down on his kid friendly short stack. He added strawberries and chocolate chips to his.


Have I ever explained that brunch is my favorite meal of the day? I loves me some brunch. I brunch hard! What I especially love about brunch at Yolk is that they don't make be choose between sweet and savory. You can add a "side" of pancakes to just about anything you order! I got a scramble with turkey sausage, salsa, Monterrey jack cheese, and avocado.... with a side of pancakes. Also tasty? Their fresh squeezed strawberry OJ. Mmmm. So good. My niece got the peach cobbler crepes for dessert- I mean "breakfast." My sister and brother-in-law both got skillets which include eggs your way with fixin's on top of fried potatoes. This place was such a hit the kids asked to come back the next morning for breakfast as well!







Next up we took the "L" to the Shedd Aquarium. There was a line. There is ALWAYS a line.






If I can make one recommendation it's pre-buy your tickets. Waiting outside in a long long long line is no fun. It's especially no fun to do it with 3 kids who got cranky just waiting for the bus. Also, bring snacks. That place is HUGE and you could literally spend a whole day there.

Hey yo! I've been super busy this past month doing crafty, travel, tasty things so I'm going to post a few things and catch you all up. A few weeks ago I traveled to Chicago w/ my younger cousin. She was accepted into Roosevelt University and wanted to check out the Loop located campus. As I briefly lived there for 3 months I volunteer to be her tour guide. We traveled separately on the train into town thanks to the frequent rider points of a couple of my dearest friends (Thanks Kidder/Hoekstra fam!). We also stayed in the lovely Logan Square neighborhood thanks to another friend of mine (DRL the greatest hand model alive). Of course any travel plans equal a foodie tour for moi so we got down to the business of eating lots of good food.

Last time I was in Chicago I checked out Rick Bayless' Xoco because I'd heard they make awesome churros. The first time I had a churro I was in southern Spain and I've been trying to find that churro y chocolate combo since 2003. What I've come to realize is that Spanish churros are totally different than Mexican churros. So I guess I'll have to update my passport. This second most recent trip to Xoco was inspired by a post online about their torta ahogada. That's a Mexican sandwich drowning in a spicey tomato broth. The menu's selection has carnitas which I don't eat. But a little birdie told me you can order a side of the ahogada broth to go with the torta of your choice. Which is what I did.

After ingesting our own private food babies my cousin and I walked (ok we got a little turned around) to a local used book shop. As we're both big readers we browsed the aisles for a while. She ended up buying 2 new books... one at my recommendation. While inside it'd started raining so then I took my cousin on a hunt for galoshes as I was just wearing my "phoms" (my fake Tom's shoes bought from Payless). A Ne Griot with soggy cold feet is not a happy tour guide. So it was a must! I found some awesome yellow rain boots on sale at Marshalls for $15. You will see them in an upcoming picture.

The next morning we woke up and headed downtown to Roosevelt's campus. Once at the open house I spied a logo board which I promptly made my cousin pose in front of a la red carpet style. Here she is reluctantly striking a pose.



Afterward I was psyched to check out a new doughnut place downtown called Do Rite doughnuts. They make fresh fryed fancy pants doughnuts. The plan was to meet up with my friends and have snack and a chat. My friend Kidder went to one of the other institutions of higher learning my cousin got into and so he offered to give her the rundown on undergrad at a small Quaker school in Indiana. However,things did not go as planned. In all my planning I didn't realize that Do Rite is ONLY open weekdays. So we did a quick yelp search and headed up to the Gold Coast area to More cupcakery.












As you can see I chose the s'more cupcake. Who can pass up a mini-hand crafted marshmallow? Not I! My cousin got Irish Coffee flavor. K and H shared a champagne cupcake. In the end I found the cake to my nice and moist. A must for any cupcake in my opinion. It's not just about the frosting. That's a good thing w/ More too b/c the whole lot of of found the frosting could have used MORE sugar. More gets points for not having an overly sweet frosting w/ a super smooth texture. But, they loose points because butter cream frosting is supposed to taste like more than whipped butter.

On Sunday I dropped my cousin off at the train station and got down to the business of some quality grown up time. K, H, and I treked to the Logan Square/Palmer Square area and had fancy dranks at this new gin joint called Scofflaw. I HIGHLY recommend it. I am a true gin girl and can down gimlets with the best of them. It's actually how I got through K & H's wedding (I kid!). Then on Monday I was finally able to get to Do Rite and get my doughnut fix. It's a small shop that makes small batches of doughnuts. They begin frying at 6:30am and stop at 11:30am. The shop closes once the doughnuts run out. And me having OCD tendencies meant that I was convinced they'd run out of doughnuts before I got my lazy self out of bed and downtown. They didn't and I was able to not get arrested for throwing a brick through the window's shop in anger.




We got a half dozen doughnuts for $17! The flavors we chose were: old fashioned buttermilk, chocolate valrhona (x2), pistachio w/ meyer lemon glaze, maple bacon, and carrot cake. Do Rite does them right so I think it's totally worth it. We sampled them all immediately and left a few for late night grazing.

Read all about the crafting adventure I recently organized. There should be no doubt that I, Neo Griot, love the kids. I've got nieces and nephews... play nieces and nephews... and lil' Tre from down the street. So of course I'm always thinking of ways to get them to unplug from the Matrix and have some old fashioned fun. Just call me Morpheus because there is no spoon! Give $20 and a dollar store and like a good Americorps alum I get things done!

To keep with the Judeo Christian hegemony engulfing us I used Easter as an excuse to gather a group of wee ones for some craftastic fun. First we made paper baskets to collect our goodies in.



If you look closely you can see the sample completed basked in the middle of the table. But we all started out with a 12x12 square piece of card stock and 1 strip of paper.



I pre-measured and marked out a "tic-tac-toe" grid on all the square pieces. The kids then cut along two of the parallel sets of lines. Next, they folded the inner pieces inwards so the paper looked kind of like an "H." Then,they pulled the side pieces up and staple the flaps together and you get a basket type shape. I know this all sounds kind of confusing but it's not. If 8 year olds can follow these directions so can you. Finally, the kids stapled on the remaining strip of paper to create a handle.


The second project was food based. We decorated cupcakes to look like wee birds' nests. I found these mini-chicks at the craft store and bought them waaaay back in February because I knew they'd come in handy. How can resist something so cute? I made some lemon cupcakes ahead of time, dyed some shredded coconut green, and added some more food coloring to some plain butter cream. Mini-malted eggs stood in as mock birds eggs and the rest is delicious history!

Next up was egg dying. I know there's all this talk about naturally dying eggs but I wasn't up to it. Also, did you know you can by kits for $1 at the dollar store? I bought a few different types... We had plain old dye, a speckled egg dying kit, a "magic"/wax crayon dying kit, and a few stickers to use as stencils. The kids were all too excited to get started and the biggest challenge was waiting for the dye to dry in between steps in order to give them the speckled treatment.





Afterwards, the kids got to pick their own make and take project. The three available were: an Easter card, a finger puppet, and/or a funny bunny hat. No one chose the bunny hat. Sadly the finger puppets didn't turn out too well. It's hard to glue pom-pom balls onto pipe cleaners. In hindsight I would have just brought my glue gun.



Here's a picture of the whole gang, baskets full and before the impending sugar high.


I hope this inspires some of you out there to take the time to get crafty with the younguns in your life.

...and real pain for my sham friends. Or something like that. I mentioned before (I think) how my resolution was to be more social. Well, I'm keeping up with this new behavior. It could even be a new pattern. My good friend (he of Real Good Food fame) Devin had a house party this past weekend. The theme? Mardi Gras. And to keep things cosmopolitan the hosts included a bit of French culture by having crepes at the party. What goes well with crepes? Champagne my friends. So of course I had to take it to the next level and pull out the ice cream maker... That's right. I made champagne flavored ice cream. Did I just blow your mind? I hope so. The recipe was super easy!

CHAMPAGNE ICE CREAM
1 1/2 c heavy cream
1/2 c sugar
1/2 c champagne/sparkling wine
2 TBS corn starch
2 pieces of lemon zest

Technically I guess what I made was sparkling wine ice cream b/c the stuff I bought at Trader Joe's was not from the Champagne region of France. My bad for misleading you. But Neo Griot, you ask, how did you get it to freeze?! Well, I added the booze to the cream mixture and let it come to a boil. Then I took the heat down to low added the sugar, let it dissolve... then I added a bit of cornstarch slurry to thicken it up. Ta-Da! I passed the mixture through some cheese cloth and put it into the ice cream machine. Less than 20min. later I had a nice sized batch of ice cream.

Unfortunately there are no pictures of the dynamic duo of crepe and ice cream together. I'd hard to take pictures of food in the middle of a house party post midnight. But, it was good. At least that's what I heard through the wine grape vine. Picture it in your head...

The day after the party just happened to be my birthday so my friends and I celebrated by going to brunch. Why? Because that's what classy adult types do on a Sunday afternoon. As you know I'm all about tokens of appreciation and sentiment that take the form of food. So I HAD to make a lil' something to give my friends. Luckily, the week before my birthday is Valentine's day. I made some whoopie pies for the occasion but I didn't plan to post about them b/c I was leaving on a plane the next day and had to pack. I didn't have time to take pictures of the process. I DID end up with some leftover cake scraps though and you know what? Cake freezes pretty well. Upon my return home I pulled those scraps outta the freezer and got to work on some cake pops. Food on a stick is always a viable option b/c its portable! The original vision was a chocolate cake pop, dipped in caramel, and then dipped in dark chocolate and sprinkled with sea salt. So here's a mini tutorial in pictures on how to make cake pops if you don't already know.


Step 1.) Know your flavor profile. Mine was caramel, dark chocolate and sea salt.


Step 2.) Crumble up some cake. When it's nice an crumbly add in some frosting, mix well. I bought some caramel frosting to go w/ the flavor profile. (I was too lazy/cheap to use butter to make my own butter cream. There would be some left over and frosting does not keep as well as cake in the freezer.)


Step 3.) Have a ball... mine were chocolaty. Take the frosting/cake mixture and roll it into balls. I used a cookie scoop for uniform sizes. Afterwards set them in the fridge to firm up for a bit so you can more easily manhandle them later.


Step 4.) Remove balls from the fridge and make them into pops. I used shorted lolly sticks b/c that's what I had in stock. For a bit of extra security you can dip the sticks into some melted chocolate/candy coating before sticking them into the cake balls.


Step 5.) Dip, baby, dip. This is a shot of me attempting to put on the first coat of caramel. In the end I had to ditch it b/c the caramel was so heavy the cake balls kept falling off the sticks:( So I back tracked and just dipped them in the melted dark chocolate instead. As the chocolate shell dried I gave the pop a little spin and sprinkled a bit of sea salt on it.


Step 6.) Make it pretty! A little scrap paper, a stamp, some ink, and curling ribbon was all it took!

Hey yo! So I got myself a couple new pipping tips this month. I've been wondering why my #10 tip wasn't swirling the way I see on cupcakes in the bake shops. A little internet research enlightened my I've been using the wrong size pipping tip! A #10 isn't BIG enough. So I went out and bought myself a 1M star tip and a 2D tip.I got to practice my pipping skills on a set of cupcakes for my friend Sarah's birthday.

I decided to keep things pretty simple. I made a plain yellow cupcake that I stuffed with cookie butter and topped with a white chocolate ice cream. Whoa..... What's cookie butter you ask? It's awesomeness in a jar. It's this European treat kinda like Nutella but not. I think the brand name is Speculoos but because Trader Joe's doesn't really carry brand names they call it cookie butter. It's the taste of a spiced cookie (here in Michigan we have Windmill cookies) in a jar. So delicious... so evil. I wonder if there's an oxymoron that described that oppositional relationship?

Ta-Da!!!! I brought a few of these along with some bourbon I'd infused (with ginger, cinnamon and vanilla) to Sarah's house and we had a little mini-party full of food and laughter. It was good times.

14 Karats? Ummm I made a carrot cake for Christmas. It's got a bit of a twist because it's spiced with ginger AND has crystallized ginger folded into the batter. Because much like Ike & Tina I never, ever do nothin' nice and easy... My mind's big wheels keep on turnin' and hopefully my cakes are never burnin'. Hahaha! Sometimes (all the time) I crack myself up. Does anyone else's brain run on pop culture references? I truly believe we're almost to the point of over saturation much like in the book "Super Sad True Love Story." Has anyone else noticed how dated most jokes in movies/tv are these days? You've got to be up on the latest gossip in order for anything to be funny. Help those who don't know what twitter is... Or who Yeezey is.

This is why when I bake/cook for family (i.e. my gramps) I like to start with something familiar and tweak it a bit. Thus, the ginger spiced carrot cake. A golden idea if I dare say so myself. I used this recipe for the cake but use good ol' cream cheese frosting to top it off. I also learned during some googling that cold cream cheese makes for a better frosting. That's a new baking tip to put in the hard drive/memory bank. All this time I've been letting mine soften on the counter and wondering why it wouldn't hold the firm consistency I wanted.