And you thought I’d never go back to school.  It’s finally happening.  A mini road trip.

(That’s right, I’m lying to myself.  A MINI road trip?  Yea, sure Nina.  2,129 miles and a total of about 34 hours is most definitely a casual drive.  The kind of thing where one wakes up one day, makes the moves and, three days later find themselves 6 states away.  Definitely a last, moment, small decision.)

The first day took my mom and me out of California—sad, yes, don’t talk about it—and through Reno, Nevada where at the Dish Café bottomless coffee, perhaps the greatest invention for the caffeine addicted, and a whole-wheat maple scone woke us up.  Now this scone was perfect.  A fluffy and light whole-wheat scone is hard to come by and not only did this one taste nutty and mapley—making up adjectives—but it definitely tasted like butter.  And I like things that taste like butter.  After that it was through the salt flats of Utah and onto Salt Lake City where Mormon’s don’t wear short-shorts—this I did not know—and the moles at the Red Iguana fill all kinds of the hungry.

Is it obscene?  Well, that really depends on where you stand in the battle of fat.  Are you afraid of a little cream, a little butter?  What about a little sugar then?

In a pervious post I noted that, as a Crack Pie Round Two, I was going to dress the Crack Pie portion of the Chocolate-Malt Cake and Blueberry and Cream Cookies Momofuku Milk Bar Trio in my absolutely favorite treatment.  Make it into Ice Cream.  So, that little amount of butter—you know, ½ a pound isn’t that much—plus a custard base, that’s not obscene, is it?  I’ve discovered that, when it comes to ice cream, my stomach and brain—oh yea, not the reasonable part of my brain, no way that gray matter has anything to do with my decisions today—demolish my arteries.  You’re clogging you say?  Butter will help with that.

Recipe on next page.

If you wonder why it is exactly that I seem to consume an inordinate amount of sugar, butter, and in general why my diet consists of coffee, ice cream, and chocolate, above is the reason why.

Yes, seared scallops on a bed of celery root puree topped with microgreens dressed in a sherry vinagrette.  Goat cheese croquettes with a shallot balsamic mixed green salad.  Oh yea, and roasted zucchini risotto, just to round out the table.  (Warm bread too, but whose keeping track?)

Why is it that I hardly ever cook real food?  Why is it that I’ll pass up mediocre frozen lasagne, mixed vegetables from a bag?  It’s because, for the past twenty years, my mom has been making dinners, like the one above, every single day.  Yes, seared scallops are a casual, everyday, sort of thing.  Just yesterday, we had Bacon Braised Pork Chops with Rosemary Scent Savoy Cabbage, fresh Summer Corn Pudding, Green Salad with Candied Almonds and an Orange Vinagrette– all homemade, even the squeezed juice, and plated, of course, with orange wedges around the platter– and rice.  The night before was a rack of lamb, Garlic Parsley Green Beens, Scalloped Potato Gratin, and Lemon Ceasar Salad.  (Homemade dressing, of course.)  I decided to take pictures, just this once, to explain.  You’ll be wondering why I don’t show you dinner everyday.

So yes, I’m spoiled, I’m a food snob.  It’s why almost everybody elses’ savory meals, well, never really match up.  Don’t get me wrong, I am eternally grateful whenever somebody feed me.  But it’s not like my mom’s cooking.  And when I say it, I really mean it.  Once again, I’ll fully admit that my appetite has been ruined forever.  But it’s not my fault, I swear.  If you had been eating food like this for two decades, you’d be a little picky too.

Recipe on the next page.

Blueberry and Cream Cookies, you taste like blueberry pie.  Blueberry Pie mixed with something a little salty-sweet and malty.  You’re chewy, crunchy, and toothsome.  And fun to eat.  So, so fun to eat.

On my last trip to the Momofuku Milkbar, after cake and sugar cookie soft serve, I left with a bag of cookies for later consumption.  Because, yes, I was full.  Full of sugar, and pork buns, and rice cakes, and noodles.  A couple feet out the door into the New York Christmastime winter, and that brown paper bag filled with Marshmallow Cornflake Cookies, Chocolate Cookies, Compost Cookies, that brown paper bag was already dripping with grease stains.  Grease stains at their most beautiful, of course.

I’ve only had one interaction with the Momofuku Empire, or two, but they happened in the same day, within the relatively same window of time as each other, and my stomach was most definitely still digesting what I had eaten at the Noodle Bar when I wandered into the Milkbar.  I mean, I was still very, very full.  So full in fact, that I could not finish the cake, ice cream, and two cookies I had ordered.  Ridiculous, I’m sure.

Regardless of my stomach’s apparent deficiencies and all-around disappointing showing when faced with a second lunch and a little dessert, the Milkbar was amazing.  Not in a culinary, wow those flavors!  Wow that technique kind of way.  In a different way, a wow, that never would have occurred to me. If one sat down and imagined all the things one has ever eaten, starting from the beginning of memory, chances are that your childhood flavors do not include celery root or Dungeness crab ravioli with a lobster and sweet corn sauce.  (Yes, delicious.)  Those taste memories would be of the more Fruit Loops, French Toast Crunch, Ding-Dong, and Hawaiian Sweet Roll variety—though in complete honesty my childhood was also studded with a love of veal with capers and Korean barbeque.

What Christina Tosi does at the Milkbar is take those lowbrow childhood memories, and cram them into cakes, cookies, pies, and ice cream.  The result is delicious.  It’s different from the tortes and mousses, but delicious nonetheless.  And Ovaltine in a cake?  It’s also just a little silly, enough so to induce giggles.

Yes, this is what it looks like.

It’s my favorite place on Earth, brought to you through the magic of food and beach porn.

There’s not much to say, so I’ll just show you.  Beautiful bays, and lots of ice cream.  Oh yea, and candy.  Below is Bittersweet Ice Cream from the Ice Castle.

It’s a hard, hard, life.

Last Saturday I left the cold and foggy summer days of northern California for the muggy and steamy heat of New York City.  Except, upon arrival, New York did not at all live up to its stereotypical weather forecast.  For the past 20 years, the empire state has reliably sweated and burned me each and every summer.  So of course, the summer San Francisco lives up to being the coldest winter locale during the months of June and July—thank you Mr. Twain—New York decides to dump rain from her overcast skies.

It was a veritable flood.  Not a generous sprinkling, where some but not all would look outside casually during breakfast and pronounce, “Darling, it’s raining.” But a downright, plaster your clothes to the front of your body, rain. The kind of rain that creates a slick on the street and then continues to divot that puddle with a sheet of raindrops.

Thankfully, the City is ever equipped with coffee shops and bakeries, to placate delicate Californians.

Most specifically, the Two Little Red Hens bakery and the Luna Café on the Upper East Side.   At Luna Café, the mochas are phenomenal and one can enjoy watching the rain from the comfort of a leather couch in an almost entirely glass storefront.  However the Two Little Red Hens, of Turtle Bar Fame, is a bakery that I have to restrain myself from visiting more than once during a day.  It’s requires daily trips for mochas, for Brooklyn Blackout Cakes and Cupcakes, for Lemon Bars, peanut butter pies, Boston Cream Pies, Cookies, scones…

I can’t help myself.  Especially when it’s raining.

Above are the Boston Cream Pie and Marble Mini Cupcakes. We arrived at the bakery a little past 3 o’clock and they were already running low on my favorites…

Below is my grandfather on his 90th birthday, with a Brooklyn Blackout Cake from the Two Little Red Hens.  As you can see, he too is shocked that he turned 90 years old.

Cupcakes are hard not to love.  They’re just so cute.  To be honest, I only made cupcakes because I wanted to frost them with little soft peaks, and then have them sitting around on the counter for a couple days, just to look at.  I don’t really enjoy eating cake—batter, on the other hand, is never safe, I need to bake the batter immediately, lest it all mysteriously disappears before reaching the oven—but I just wanted to have cupcakes.

I am not a fan of cupcake bakeries.  Cupcakes are easy to make, too easy, it seems, to justify an entire bakery.  A cupcake truck however, is also just too cute.  Driving around, dispensing little perfectly frosted circles of cake, often time with absurd yet delicious combinations.  For me however, when I do eat a cupcake, I want it to be absolutely delicious looking.  It should be a crime to not eat the cupcake.  A perfect cupcake fore me is not pristine, with perfectly mounded frosting and painted discs, not covered in sprinkles, and not at the sweet price of six dollars.  I want a cupcake that looks like it should, small, a little bit of cake, and mounded with messy, rich, sweet frosting.  When the lid comes off the cake cover, I want the cupcakes to smell up the room.  And when I eat a cupcake, I want to get frosting on my nose.

So yesterday when I said I magically found myself in the Dulce de Leche section of the Latin grocery store, that wasn’t entirely true.  You see, in terms of the ice cream I was about to make, the dulce de leche was an inspired, last minute improvement to the Horchata Ice Cream that really could only have been predestined by grocery store minions.  But, when you consider the alfajores my little sister was planning on making—the very alfajores that have been creeping around in the back of my mind—the dulce de leche section and I already had a predetermined date.

Alfajores are very, very sweet, but the nutty butteryness of the cookies and the deep toasty milk caramel flavor of the dulce de leche combine to make an absolutely delicious sandwich cookie.  With a little powdered sugar or toasted coconut on the side, these cookies are deceptively easy to make and exceptionally elegant.  Also, they’re sandwich cookies, by far the superior cookie in the land.

Blame this resurgence of Ice Cream Week on a taco truck.  A taco truck after 1:00 a.m. in an exceptionally interesting part of Los Angeles that would most definitely be impossible to find again during the day in a normal state of mind.  Parked next to an electrical box in a v-shaped parking lot at the corner of an intersection that boasted many neon signs for cars, different sorts of random items, and a lot of Spanish, the truck was surrounded by various people in different states of being.  Most stood around with plates eating little three inch tacos.

And while I backed down from the tongue—lengua— taco in a cowardly and sober way, I did try a bit of the head taco and the grilled onions, both of which were delicious, greasy, spicy and appreciably salty without being over powering.  The meat was mounted on a vertical spit and the tacos were assembled by a surprisingly large number of people crammed into a standard sized truck.  One would pull the tortilla out of the steamer, another would hold it under the spit and slice of sheets of meat which then fell a foot or two to the tortilla.  The taco then got a sprinkling of herbs and spices, finished off by a pile of grilled onions.  But the last man, the man who hand the dollar tacos out the window, also distributed Styrofoam cups of horchata, which, on a hot LA night, is quite literally perfect.

Having never tried horchata—again a major fail in the adventurous palette department—mostly due to an overwhelming but still highly irrational fear of fruit and even the slightest possibility that horchata may taste like bananas, I was shocked. The first sip was slow, and surprising. Horchata is everything I love, except sucked through the narrow vein of straw for maximum ease.  It’s cool, sweet, refreshing, and slightly spicy.  It’s light.  And while I still have a great dislike of fruit, I’ve been kicking myself ever since for not giving horchata a try sooner.