Merry Christmas

Hello Everyone!

My resolution in 2014 is to resurrect this blog. Honestly.

I love baking and I love movies so much that the combination of both continues to excite me. I continuously have great ideas for movie and even TV recipe mash-ups I'd like to attempt.

I've just been in a rut lately. Not a bad rut, but I've been very overwhelmed by my getting married, moving to a new home, and, on a negative note, my father's serious illness. I still continue to bake, and it brings me so much warmth and comfort. I had to step away from this blog for a few months to realize how much I missed it.

So yes, I will be back in in 2014. In the meantime, I will leave you with some Christmas cookie recipes that I love. They are all from my favorite magazine, Taste of Home. I hope you enjoy!

1) Italian Rainbow Cookies
Luscious almond flavor perfectly blends with thin layers of tart apricot and raspberry preserves. Don't forget the layer of chocolate on top! These cake-like, tri-colored cookies are a unique addition to any Christmas treat exchange.
Find the recipe here:  http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/rainbow-cookies

2) Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies
Yes, you read that right. The cream cheese makes these delectable little biscuits soft and gives them a bit of a tang. A perfect way to add a subtle new edge to a classic recipe.
Find the recipe here: http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/melt-in-your-mouth-sugar-cookies

3) Chocolate Chai Snickerdoodles
I haven't made these yet--I plan to this weekend--but since I love chocolate, and love ginger cookies, this combination intrigued me.
Find the recipe here: http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/chocolate-chai-snickerdoodles

4) Pecan Meltaways
My mother says these remind her of a traditional Venezuelan cookie she used to make in her childhood called "polvorosa" (meaning "powdery"). These are simple and delicious, soft and easy to carry. Great to give as gifts.
Find the recipe here: http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/pecan-meltaways

5) Peanut Butter Kiss Cookies
My mother-in-law makes these yearly for Christmas, and this year I am excited to bake my own version. I am very particular about how I like peanut butter but I've always loved these cookies for their sumptuous chocolate center.
Find the recipe here:  http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/peanut-butter-kiss-cookies

Just writing this simple post has gotten me excited for more to come! I'm thinking about opening up 2014 with a King Cake recipe. Can't wait!

Have a wonderful holiday and a blessed New Year!

Love,
Ally

Wedding Bells and More!

Hello!

So far, two exciting things have happened this year: I got married and I moved into a new house. Little wonder I had no time to write! However, the more things change, the more I want to bake. Expect a new entry up soon with a yummy bread pudding recipe.

~Ally

Happy New Year!

Hello everyone!

Wishing you all a safe and wonderful New Year. Reel Bakers shall return in 2013.

Love,
Ally

Hurricane Sandy Help

Hi Everyone!

In my last post, I wrote about how happy I was that Boston had quickly recovered from Hurricane Sandy. I am so thankful for that, but there are other areas that are still dealing with the devastation of the storm, including New York, New Jersey, and Appalachia. While an undergrad student, I made so many friends from NY and NJ and I'm sad that these regions have been so damaged.

Here are some links for donations if you would like to help:

Red Cross (disaster relief, rescue operations, blood donation): http://www.redcross.org/

Salvation Army (providing shelter, clothes, and goods for the dispossessed): http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn_2.nsf

United Way (coastal recovery efforts): https://donate.unitedwaynyc.org/page/contribute/uwsandyrecovery

Humane Society of the United States (rescuing pets caught in the storm and providing relief to their owners): https://secure.humanesociety.org/site/Donation2?df_id=11020&11020.donation=form1&s_src=webdn_sandy_ws102912

Habitat for Humanity (rebuilds homes that have been lost): http://www.habitat.org/

In addition, check out these websites for comprehensive lists of charities. http://rockcenter.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/01/14861838-hurricane-sandy-how-you-can-help?lite and http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/115483/how-to-help-hurricane-sandy-relief-efforts provide information on charities ranging from the Community Foodbank of New Jersey, Catholic Charities, Americares, and The Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City.

Please help!

And if you are from an area affected by Hurricane Sandy, please know that we all support you and urge you to stay strong.

Apple Cake and The Adventures of Robin Hood

It's interesting how days unfold. Yesterday, Boston was gripped with the edge of Hurricane Sandy, spewing torrents of wind. Rain rattled like a shower of marbles against my windows. The lights flickered on and off ominously. However, today the sky shines with a light blue hue and sunlight dapples the piles of brown and orange leaves dotting the grass. Only the wet twigs strewn across the road and a fallen tree down my street bear witness to yesterday's calamitous weather. The Earth is renewing itself, healing its wounds, ready to begin again. It is a lesson we all can learn.

September was a hectic month for me. I began graduate school, and it took me awhile to become accustomed to academic rhythms yet again. Happiness swells inside me whenever I engage in a class discussion, realizing how much I missed talking about history and sharing viewpoints with others. I also started a column for an Italian-American newspaper entitled about the holidays, customs, and folklore of Italy, and I have found this more rewarding than anything I have ever done. However, I found myself itching to get back to baking, to those quiet nights spent in the kitchen measuring ingredients and watching them transform, as if by magic, into a delectable treat in the oven. So once October began, I vowed to dive into baking and blogging again.

What better time to start baking than late October, when the dark nights settle into a quiet stillness and the kitchen light bathes the room in a cozy, homey glow. This is the time of cinnamon and apples, pumpkin and ginger, pears and nutmeg, all rich scents and tastes that tap into the very essence of autumn. Writing this now on the day before Halloween, I look outside at the yellow leaves blowing against a tranquil sky and can practically feel ancient souls and memories surrounding me. In honor of the sense of history fall inspires, the medieval origin of Halloween and my new-found affection for the television show Game of Thrones, the movie I chose for this blog entry is The Adventures of Robin Hood. Here are Dan's thoughts.

The Adventures of Robin Hood

Adding the finishing touches to his Robin Hood, Kevin Costner made some caustic remarks about Michael Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood and vowed to improve upon the accuracy and the spectacle. His glum film did neither and The Adventures of Robin Hood remains the ultimate swashbuckling classic. Striving for accuracy in a Robin Hood movie is a dubious venture anyway. As with King Arthur, so much of what is known about the Sherwood Forest outlaw exists in a no man’s land of history and legend.

Given the futility of presenting a purely historical, the measure of a Robin Hood movie is the sheer joy and thrills. The Adventures of Robin Hood delivers that in spades, feeling fresh each time Errol Flynn, in the green tights that immortalized him, welcomes us to Sherwood.  It’s a beautiful, lush, movie and Warner Bros. knew it from the start.  They splurged on this one and the studio’s spare-no-expense approach in recreating Sherwood in California and with the lush Technicolor. Robin Hood and his Merry Men swing by and fight the tyrannical Prince John’s (Claude Rains) minion Sir Guy of Gisbourne (Basil Rathbone), in the sword fight to start and end all sword fights, creating a magnificent splash of colors. 

Errol Flynn is the ideal outlaw, charming enough for Maid Marion (Olivia de Havilland, taking our breath away) and agile enough to evade capture. It’s a thrill ride before the concept of thrill rides at the movies became synonymous with CGI. Flynn may have taken the swashbuckler thrown from Douglas Fairbanks, but in The Adventures of Robin Hood he makes it his own.  And so it has stayed, Flynn remains the ultimate Robin Hood stunning us with feats that not even the wizards behind the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise could duplicate with all their computer and digital slickness. 

See The Adventures of Robin Hood for its beauty, sheer joy, and for the role that forever cemented Errol Flynn as a man of flight. 

Thanks, Dan! And now for the recipe...

Oh, wow. This recipe. I knew I wanted to make something with apples for Robin Hood ever since I read a medieval recipe for an apple galette. I settled for a cake, however, but I never expected to make a cake this good. Speaking completely without hyperbole, this is the best apple cake I have ever tried. It is soft, silky, and hits the right balance between sweetness and spice. The butterscotch sauce on top adds a light yet decadent surprise. This recipe was a contest winner at Taste of Home magazine, submitted by a reader named Debi Benson. It's no contest, I'll be making this one again.

Apple Cake

From Taste of Home, by Debi Benson

Serves 12-14

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 2 cups sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 6 cups tart apples, peeled and chopped into small square chunks

For butterscotch sauce:

• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/4 cup butter, cubed
• 1/2 cup whipping cream

1) In a large bowl, cream butter, sugar and vanilla. The mixture will appear crumbly. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. In a small bowl, combine flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt and baking soda. Gradually add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mix well--the batter will be stiff. Fold in apples until well combined.

2) Spread batter into a greased 13- by 9-in baking dish. Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 40-45 minutes until lightly browned on top or until it springs back lightly when gently touched. Let cool for 30 minutes before serving.

3) For sauce: Combine brown sugar and butter in a small saucepan. Cook over medium heat until butter melts. Gradually add whipping cream. Stirring constantly, bring to a slow boil over medium heat. Remove from heat. Drizzle on top of cake slices when serving.

Next Time: I'm thinking All Quiet on the Western Front, not sure about the recipe

October Love!

Wow, what an interesting month this is turning out to be. I'm deeply involved in my grad school class, I started a new column for a Boston newspaper, and now a hurricane is expected to hit my area tomorrow! And on top of all that, I am filled with the excitement of the approaching Halloween--I just hope it isn't a wash-out!

I'm going to try to post the recipe for the Apple Cake in the next few days. Here's hoping that I'll be able to.

In the meantime, have a spooky, wonderful, safe Halloween!

Mixed-Berry Strata and Superhero Movies

August has always been one of my favorite months because it crackles vibrantly with the excitement of a changing season. Remnants of the past summer still permeate through the air: stagnant days when the temperature lingers above 90 degrees, children hawking lemonade on street corners, sunny songs blaring out of car radios, songs which will fade from memory like a worn pair of jeans once the first leaf turns gold. Tucked into all those vernal pleasures are evanescent hints of the fall to come, vying for my attention as they giggle and flit behind trees. I felt autumn in the smoothness of bread dough as I kneaded it under my hands to make a focaccia for Lammas, in the way dusty orange buds drifted off the branches of a gnarled tree in front of my grandmother's house, in the clouds that streaked the full moon in a sky darkening earlier each day. These changes filled me with joy. Some people equate autumn with sadness, but for me it was always a season where I could feel the rhythms of the Earth's cycle changing beneath my feet.

This August, though, it was hard to muster the same anticipation that accompanied me other years. First of all, a serious illness visited my family. Then, I encountered a situation at work where I felt as if I had been taken advantage of and exploited. This last piece of news especially battered my already vulnerable soul. The memories of the past two years in which I had devoted myself to the workplace and made an unwavering commitment to its students tumbled inside me in jumbled expressions of shock and incredulity. My first emotion was an anger so jagged and sharp it reminded me of a crude dagger, piercing my inside every time I thought of how my hard work went unappreciated by the administration of the place. Later, this anger deflated into a hollow emptiness as my fond recollections of the workplace became tainted and my future smudged into a fuzzy mess as I debated demanding more respect from these administrators or silently remaining at work there in order to support my family and my upcoming marriage. I am still struggling to think of this place without any bitterness, and I hope that this bitterness will evaporate enough in the coming weeks so that when I go back to work I can focus on those who matter the most: my students.

One day about a week after this news, I was inside a Marshall's with my mother when I saw a shelf of Halloween decorations. Since Halloween is still two months away, the shelf barely reached around a whole wall, but it was still full of sparkly iron outlines of black cats, soft witch dolls clad in gingham rags, burnt orange ceramic pumpkins, and wooden "Welcome" signs emblazoned with drawings of blowing leaves. As I glanced at these decorations, that familiar excitement I usually felt as summer turns to fall returned, spreading inside me like warm coals. No matter how disappointing things may seem, this autumn will still be laden with good food to bake and wonderful holidays to celebrate with my loved ones. And at this transitional stage, I couldn't deny the joys of summer either, like berry desserts and superheroes streaking across the big screen. So I decided to make a Mixed Berry Strata from my favorite chef, Giada De Laurentiis, and couple it with Dan's essays on superhero films. Good food and memories are my X-Men and Captain Americas, shining like a ray of hope no matter what life throws at me.

Dan's Superhero Essay

Almost from inception, superheroes have coincided with times of national anguish. The ones that have lasted long enough to become icons, transcending their early comic origins into movies, TV series, and collectibles, ask fundamental questions that touch every generation fighting its own demons.

Society has a need, not just a desire, for superheroes. It’s shortsighted, I think, to dismiss this need for caped crusaders as mere escapism offering easy answers to complex problems. It’s true that part of the exhilaration of watching Superman defeat evil lies in the fantastical impossibility of the situation. Why can’t life really work that way? But the good superhero arcs touch upon very real problems and have the ability to teach us more about the real world, if only because the real world was able to think of such a world as theirs.

Batman may be the most human of all, even when soaring in his dark pointy suit. It’s no coincidence he first appeared in print in 1939, the Depression still very much a reality for millions of Americans. Economic downturns create crime and the gangsters of the 1930s have not been forgotten. No city touched by Bonnie & Clyde or John Dillinger would refuse the presence of a masked vigilante. It’s precisely Batman’s dark nature, though, that makes him so accessible a hero. Like thousands of Americans fed up with fedora wearing hoods, Batman grew impatient with law enforcement. It was now time to take matters into his own hands. The irony is, of course, that Batman himself works outside the law and in apprehending criminals, only breaks the law further.

By contrast, Spider-Man connects more strongly with a specific demographic. After all, Spidey’s human self is none other than Peter Parker, one of any lonely misunderstood high school boys. In part, Spider-Man has endured because his story would be the fulfillment of the wish of any teenager: by a freak chance (like being bitten by a spider), gain popularity, impress the pretty girl you were always too awkward to approach, and look pretty darn cool.

If Batman was a product of a nation down on the economic slumps, Iron Man fills a void for a new generation facing many of the same problems and a new threat from overseas. Tony Stark is the 1% on steroids, that’s for sure. But what really struck a human chord for me in the first Iron Man was his pivotal point.  While in Afghanistan introducing the troops to new technology, he is captured and held prisoner in a remote cave. There he begins building with scrap metal, giving birth to his McDonald’s colored alter ego. The moment Stark becomes Iron Man his wealth and financial power becomes used for the common good. His transformation into Iron Man is, then, not only a physical one, but a spiritual one as well. He is useful now to a nation that badly needs him.

The current tradition of superhero movies for the summer started with Spider-Man in 2002. Sure, the movie was in production before the attacks of September 11^th, but its release during a time of national healing undoubtedly helped it resonate stronger. The following years brought us more fear with the war in Iraq and the recession of 2008. Sure enough, Batman and Iron Man became the buzz in movies. There is then one promise of superhero movies that becomes true even in the real world. They are there when we need them. 

Thanks, Dan. As for me, I am counting down until September 25th so I can get my hands on a The Avengers DVD!

This berry strata is so good. It comes from Giada's Everyday Italian show, and it tastes like a creamy bread pudding. The ricotta adds extra decadence. Its red, white, and blue color scheme can remind you of any superhero, from Superman to Captain America. Giada never fails me, and this is yet another recipe I consider a keeper!

Mixed-Berry Strata

Adapted from Everyday Italian 

Ingredients:

• 2 Tbsp. butter
• 3 Tbsp. honey
• 4 large eggs
• 1/2 cup ricotta (use low-fat for less calories)
• 3 Tbsp. sugar
• 1 cup milk (use skim for less calories)
• 1/4 cup orange juice
• 4 slices of day-old French bread, torn into about 4 cups of small-to-medium-sized pieces 
• 1 10-oz bag frozen mixed berries, thawed and drained

1) Melt butter in microwave. Add honey to the melted butter, and stir to combine.

2) In a large bowl, combine the eggs, ricotta and sugar. Use a fork, beat the eggs and combine with mixture. Add the milk, orange juice, butter-and-honey mixture, and bread. Stir to combine. Gently fold in the berries.

3) Place the ingredients in a 10-in. round baking dish. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 2 hours.

4) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Bake until the strata is golden on top and cooked through, about 40 minutes. Let stand for 5 minutes to cool before serving. Use a spoon to serve it in messy, yummy heaps.

Next Week: I'm currently catching up on the awesome Game of Thrones TV show, so I want to do something with a medieval theme. I'm definitely thinking of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938 version with Errol Flynn) as the movie, and an apple pie or cake for the dessert!